If you read the interviews with Ryan Dahl, one big reason he chose javascript for his scripting language after considering a number of other options was that ja

If you read the interviews with Ryan Dahl, one big reason he chose javascript for his scripting language after considering a number of other options was that javascript did not already have a huge body of blocking libraries. If you're trying to script a nonblocking system where everything is nonblocking all the way up and down the stack, you're going to end up creating a parallel ecosystem to the normal one, and confuse people by not allowing them to do the normal things they would do in language X. Javascript didn't already have a huge blocking ecosystem. And speaking of ecosystem, that's another really good reason to like node. The stream programming that is coming out of the community is brilliant, and the focus on constructing large projects by writing thin modules that use other thin modules ('onion oriented programming') is fantastic. I've been doing a lot of Scala recently, and it's extremely noticeable that despite the languages power to do things in many different ways, the Scala community frequently seem to choose a strangely convoluted path filled with hidden magic going on behind the scenes where every new library you depend on feels like learning a new language from scratch. It might well be that the Go community is also as good as the node community for some of this stuff, but the community and library ecosystem is a definite plus point. Personally I've never had a problem with Javascript coding. It's perhaps easier to write stupid code in it than a lot of other languages, but I know it well enough to know where to be disciplined, and it almost never surprises me now.