[warpech]

IMO, Node's superpower is not really in the language but in the NPM ecosystem. If that is not attractive to you (maybe you develop the whole system by yourself, or need fine-tuned performance), Node only has to offer an ubiquous language, and that's about it.

[hombre_fatal]

People overlook the fact that JS is a pretty nice modern language in its own right. "Because you can" is pointlessly dismissive and indicates to me that one still thinks JS is nothing more than a language to toggle a CSS class on <h1> because they haven't used it since people used the word DHTML.

- async-everything, not a blocking language where anything async relegates you to a subecosystem like you have it in basically every other language from Java to Rust to Python.

- simple stdlib Promise that everything uses. no fragmentation between competing byob futures and byob abstractions.

- async/await.

- single-threaded making it ideal for i/o workloads, a crawler being the perfect example.

For these reasons I think it's one of the best languages. Certainly didn't used to be this way.

[jtdev]

> “ JS is a pretty nice modern language“

Are we talking about the same JS here? Because the JS I know is a dumpster fire of a language.

[Drakim]

Also just the fact that JS runtimes have had a lot of hard work put into them to make them extremely fast (motivated by the fact that JS is so widely used on the web).