The basic idea of having a framework full of nonblocking async calls for stuff and using simple cooperative threading is a reasonable design decision depending

The basic idea of having a framework full of nonblocking async calls for stuff and using simple cooperative threading is a reasonable design decision depending on what you want to do. The problem is that Node forces you to write code in continuation passing style and that is a very "low level" way to write things, missing many of the niceties languages tend to have right now. * If you want an async value you need to give it a name and put it in a callback argument. Instead of `f() + g()` you end up doing `f(function(a){ g(function(b){ ballback(a+b) } ) })` * You need to explicitly tell the order of execution of everything (as shown in the previous example) * It can very laborious to refactor a non-CPS subroutine if part of it needs to become async, specially if you have many loops or call other subroutines. Ideally you shouldn't have to do large "boilerplate" rewrites of your code just because of a small local change. If you are curious what the better alternative for to CPS style is, my opinion is that the way to have the language do the work of breaking the code into the callbacks for you, either via dialects that compile to JS or via features such as generators. While you can get away with many of the very nice async programming libraries out there, they still can't solve all the problems with CPS style (specially the refactoring one)