[pretoriusB]

Who said Javascript is good for async programming?

It was designed to be easy to use with callbacks for website UI style events (which is not quite the same as async programming).

The Node async is just a half-thought implementation of async on top of a VM that doesn't really support it. The thing it has going for it is traction (and some people new to async are amused by the callback style and find it "challenging", whatever).

Scala/Dart/Go/Rust/Haskell/etc have a better async story.

ES6 will add some promising stuff in the future (no pun intended).