[mediocregopher]

>As with everything having better features means nothing if nobody adopts

Well, it means my product is going to be superior since I went the better, if less well known, architecture. It's not like erlang is a little unsupported side-project of a language, it's actually older then javascript if you count the time period before it was open-sourced, and only a few years younger if you don't, and is used extensively by many industries.

Also, just because javascript the language is more well-known doesn't mean javascript the server architecture is more well-known. I would argue it isn't; when people want a highly concurrent, solid server, erlang is always mentioned.

Lastly, erlang is a pretty easy language to learn. I had the basics down in a day, I had a prototype pubsub server that could handle 50k connections in two. The syntax is a bit strange, and honestly it does get in the way sometimes, but it's not hard.

[maigret]

You're missing the point of Node. You can construct a web rendering application and its AJAX parts in one codebase. You can move fastly code between server and client rendering. etc etc etc.

Probably Erlang is "better". BTW, Java & C are quite fast also. Java applications, well written, do scale. If they don't, they are folks out there specialized to make them scale.

Also, Erlang is probably easy to learn as language. But when you develop a web app, you have enough other skills to keep up with. Let's name CSS for one ;) The human brain is limited in its capacity to remember API and language specifics.

Also, more popular means more libraries, which makes the product in turn better. This is why so many folks turn to PHP. It's not elegant, but everything you need is already here.

Now I won't argue that you may have good reasons to use Erlang for yourself, may it be because you like the language structure, like to write libraries by yourself, or so on. But it doesn't make it "superior", foremost not as a platform.

[ericmoritz]

So your argument is that web developers are too stupid to remember Erlang. Tell that to all those Django developers that have to juggle Python, HTML, CSS and Javascript! They must be superheros! Ruby on Rails developers must be as well!

[maigret]

I never told they are stupid. Rather, I think a simpler environment enables more productivity for the developer. Assembler is hard, some people master it in incredible ways. Does that mean that C is useless? No. Node goes the way of unifying the web stack around JavaScript, I find it a least interesting. The future will tell the rest.

[davidw]

> Well, it means my product is going to be superior

Perhaps, but for many people, node.js will be "good enough".

http://journal.dedasys.com/2006/02/18/maximizers-satisficers...

And because of the big community, there probably already are, or will be, more libraries available for it, meaning you have more ready-made blocks to build with.

I don't write this as a "supporter" of node.js, either - I've actually known and used Erlang for the past 8 years on and (mostly) off, and would highly encourage any hacker to have a look at it, because its way of doing things is quite enlightening, and, IMO, is superior to node.js.