Agreed, maybe. All this "the language/platform is just a tool, become a better carpenter" stuff is too clever by half. If you haven't played with CoffeeScript +

Agreed, maybe. All this "the language/platform is just a tool, become a better carpenter" stuff is too clever by half. If you haven't played with CoffeeScript + socket.io + express + etc recently, I'd highly recommend doing so now. I'm in a similar position of looking at node.js a year or two back and thinking "this has promise", but gave up after hitting wall after wall, four layers of callback-clusterfuck down, trying to do anything real. But things have changed. The combination of the crazy stupid money Google et. al have poured into VMs with payoffs on the client and server-side, the scalability of event-driven coding, the rapidly evolving breadth and quality of the node.js ecosystem, the modern powerful feel of CoffeeScript, and the slick simple abstractions provided by socket.io (why are there not compatible server-side libraries for other platforms?!), really are starting to give JS that Yegge "next big language" feel. If you'd told me 5 years ago there'd be serious companies replacing nginx/apache with a dynamic reverse proxy written in javascript, I would have laughed in your face. Now it's reality.