[joelangeway]

The reason they should be compared is because getting comfortable enough in Javascript to stop complaining about asynchronousity causes one to think about that aspect of programming the same way Erlang programmers do.

Erlang and Javascript are similar in that they both developed in highly asynchronous environments. And with multiple instances of Node.js, they have similar models of getting things done concurrently; that is, share nothing, pass and handle messages.

Both communities seem to prefer dynamic and/or functional solutions to programming problems rather than the sort of solutions you see in statically typed, "object oriented" languages. Though Node.js does make use of Javascript's object model, whereas Erlang uses very light weight processes to separate concerns.

Erlang's syntax is "weirder" where weird means doesn't look like C. It's semantics and facilities are much more strictly functional, though with some discipline you could use the same semantics in Javascript, minus nice functional features like pattern matching.