I certainly agree about the maturity/lots of small patches to existing packages part. I would guess that LOC growth in Node is (proportional to, say, Ruby) even

I certainly agree about the maturity/lots of small patches to existing packages part. I would guess that LOC growth in Node is (proportional to, say, Ruby) even higher than the package growth for exactly this reason: not only are there a lot of new packages, but a lot of churn in existing ones. I'll add that the lots-of-small-packages thing makes it easier for us to parachute in, grok the code base, fix the issue, and submit a PR. That's part of what makes Node fun, I think.