[chrisweekly]

Right on -- we're mostly in agreement.

Definitely a fair point about addressing the original question. IME, node _became_ popular in part because it allowed web developers to start solving problems themselves, directly, using a language they already knew [albeit a kind of terrible/problematic language at the time], to do things like CLI scripting for automation of tedious FE dev workflow tasks (a la Grunt and bower), or standing up dirt-simple web servers. At that point the floodgates had opened. With the concomitant (and ongoing) shift in architectures toward executing more and more of the application on the client side (with hugely popular services like gmail and google maps demonstrating the power of "Ajax"), the rest became almost inevitable. With Node, like Javascript in general, the quality followed the popularity, as world-class engineers set to fixing and improving what was available to work with, to shape it into something better-suited to the task. The process might even be ~akin to selective adaptation in biological evolution.

[laumars]

I like how you've phrased that. It's a lot better (and less opinionated) than what I put :)