[hath995]

I'm not an expert on Node.js but my understanding is that Ryan Dahl wasn't happy with the performance that PHP and Apache provide. PHP is very feature complete but the way Apache handles web requests means that a web server has a relatively low max capacity. Apache handles requests by forking the process which is both slow and resource intensive.

The way Ryan explained it is that moving past that performance barrier is a solved by a single threaded application that can respond to event based input output. He liked Javascript because it is such a minimal language which already supports that paradigm and has advanced tools and community.

That's the main point that I recall from one of the talks of his that I watched. There are some tertiary reasons as well which make Javascript a good choice.