My understanding, as an outsider, was that the birth of node went like this: "Evented, async, processing is faster than threads in many cases. What if you had

My understanding, as an outsider, was that the birth of node went like this: "Evented, async, processing is faster than threads in many cases. What if you had a platform/language that you could only do async IO in? Well we could take an existing language and replace the IO layer, or we could just take javascript that has no-IO layer and add it in. Thus in node it's impossible to write blocking code. (Let me knoe if I'm wrong on that last bit)." Then it went from interesting experiment to useful, and thus to popular very quickly. Either because V8 is so very fast, or because lots of people know and like javascript, or because callbacks are not that bad :-). Not sure which.