[nnq]

Imho it's greatly valuable to have a "real scripting language" in you tool-belt. Node doesn't qualify like one to me, unless you're one those mutants with brains twisted in particular ways that actually like explicit-async code everywhere. Considering the age we live in, one with good interfaces to machine-learning stuff would be great, so Python is great to know well imho.

The kind of prototypes that I can hack together with Python + whatver frontend in a day can take 4x as much to do with Nodejs for me, simply because there are so many micro-decisions to make at every point (libA or micro-libC + micro-libB or mega-lib-D kind of stuff). And the way it leaves you with you "brains fried" after wrangling with some async bug... not worth it imho. Better to have the boring technical micro-decision made by someone else for you so you can concentrate on the cool stuff.

If you're working on anything where the product OR idea OR algorithm OR ux-process is much much much more important that "ecosystem" or scalability bulshit, nodejs will always feel at least 2x slower to develop in than either Python (if you're into AI/ML-ish things) or Ruby or Go or Elixir...

For web apps my alternative receipe would be to keep the web app nodejs and more the smarter-than-crud stuff to microservices written in anything but Nodejs.