A provocative post by Eric Jiang, entitles “The emperor’s new clothes were built with Node.js”, regarding the undeserved praise being heaped upon NodeJS. While I think he gets his analysis all right, he is still missing the forest for the trees.

Nodejs has grown the way it has grown for the same reason that Visual Basic and PHP grew the way they did: These things work well, and help people get things done quickly and relatively easily. And maybe, people even have fun doing it. The community support has been critical in all three cases.

Sure it’d be nice to have multi-threading like Go and a single set of known and blessed libraries like C# and performance like C. But we don’t have all those things in one package, not yet anyway.

There are weaknesses in NodeJS, just as there are in PHP and in VB. Despite that, JavaScript is effective for many many people, and will continue to be so. NodeJS makes JavaScript much, much more effective with the NPM and the vast set of downloadable modules.

No religion, yo: nodejs is not always the right choice. Of course it isn’t. I like nodejs and use it… daily. but I’m learning Go and am enjoying that as well.