I started programming with ruby, and was really pretty reluctant to move to less clean languages - it was just hard on my eyes when I was used to reading and wr

I started programming with ruby, and was really pretty reluctant to move to less clean languages - it was just hard on my eyes when I was used to reading and writing clean and understandable ruby code. But javascript won me over in the end, and I now write most of my apps with node. Totally unrelated to hype or to this article or to anything -- the reason why was mostly the challenges that came with switching to js. The two challenges that particularly intrigued me were: - Making async code clean, readable, and manageable. As themgt mentioned, this is a really tough challenge. It took me months of going over and over my code, continually reading about promises and async flow control etc. to really "get it". And once I got it, it was really empowering, and the ability and choice to run pieces of code in parallel or in series (which you don't get at all with sync languages) is something I'm now very reluctant to give up. - Writing code that has more syntax (braces, semicolons, low level loops, etc) and still making it clean and readable is a challenge that I think has improved the way I write all code for the better. It's so much more difficult to make javascript adhere to the cleanliness standards that I'm used to with ruby that I spend a lot more time thinking about how elegant and readable my code is and optimizing it for that purpose, which I think nobody would argue is a great thing for a developer to work on. So without comment on whether javascript is "the" language or "the future", which, as other people have mentioned, is silly to speculate, I would strongly recommend picking up node and using it to build a few apps, if just for the purpose of dealing with the two points I mentioned above : )