[dumbphone]

'With Node and a framework like Express, you can understand things at the level of "let me look at this HTTP request and decide how to respond to it."'

Sure, but roughly the same kind of thing is available in most other serverside languages. Python has Flask, Ruby has Sinatra, and PHP also has several mini-frameworks.

[TrevorBurnham]

Right, I like Sinatra a lot. But there's substantially more magic there than in Express, which is actually a pretty thin (yet powerful) wrapper around Node's low-level HTTP API.