For a lot of people - Node allows them to do a lot of things that was previously non-trivial in Ruby or Python land. From comet based applications to using sock

For a lot of people - Node allows them to do a lot of things that was previously non-trivial in Ruby or Python land. From comet based applications to using socket.io for real-time notifications. It's not that these things can't be done in other platforms. One of the problems I have with the hype around Node is that people seem to gloss over the fact that asynchronous IO is only really dramatically more useful for the particular case of wanting to have a lot of connections that are open and idle most of the time. Many people, instead of saying “Node is great for comet because of asynchronous IO” say “Node scales really well because of asynchronous IO”, when in fact those 2 statements are very different.