This wasn't what I got from Rich Hickey's talk. I understood him to be saying that, while of course you shouldn't use something just because it's new, you shoul

This wasn't what I got from Rich Hickey's talk. I understood him to be saying that, while of course you shouldn't use something just because it's new, you should use whatever will make your code simpler, even if there's a learning curve. That to me was the point of his "easy" vs. "simple" dichotomy. Using the tools you happen to be familiar with is doing what's easy for the developer. Hickey argued that you should instead accept a bit of a learning curve if it will simplify your program in the end. Now, I've never used Node, so no idea if it simplifies or complects web programming. (My current projects are in Haskell/Snap; so you can guess how I feel about learning curves.)