[crueber]

If you truly need to do sync programming for whatever reason, you probably aren't using the right language. It's not just web programming that benefits from asynchrony, it's pretty much any non-trivial algorithm. Sure, it can require a bit more code to do right, but you don't want to block all your other background events from firing just because you have to write a bit more code.

If you really prefer synchronous style, and don't mind the drawbacks, there are plenty of languages out there that'll work better for you. PHP, Ruby, and Python readily come to mind.

[greggman]

Yes, but a big draw of using node at all is that it's JavaScript. I write some function "templateThisString" and I can use it on both the server and the client. Now I also want to use it in my build process. If I switch to another language I have double the work.