> Node.js (which admittedly I've never used) would appear to be available only on a tiny minority of machines you would encounter "in the wild". Given that it

> Node.js (which admittedly I've never used) would appear to be available only on a tiny minority of machines you would encounter "in the wild". Given that it really only hit the public consciousness last November or so, that's more or less expected. What makes people so bullish is that the number of JS developers isn't going to decrease any time soon. It is, however, a pretty awful shell scripting environment and I don't know who would prefer it to Ruby. I say this despite writing a build system for it this weekend to drop dependencies on Ruby and Java. Coffeescript improves things but it's still pretty raw.