In the world of software, the best doesn't always win. What wins is; ubiquity, ease of use, & random market factors. x86 isn't the best architecture out there, Linux isn't the greatest kernel ever developed, PHP can be pretty horrible when used incorrectly, Wordpress's code is complete crap, and yes, JavaScript has some quirks. Some really really smart people at Microsoft, Sun, and Google have all attempted to add another language to the browser, and all have failed so far. The only language that has been successful is something that was created in a few weeks at Netscape. And now, that language is invading the server, and it's going to win. Every single big company on the web is toying with Node right now. During 2011, HP is going to ship tens of millions of computers and phones that has Node as a core component of the OS. The performance goals that the Node dev team are aspiring towards are mind-blowing, and you know what? I think they are going to get there.
So, to answer your question, what are the merits of Node? The "Ease of use" vs "Performance" ratio is going to be off the charts. You may feel more productive in another language. But there are millions of people who are going to enjoy the ease of use to fire up a high performing HTTP server in 3 lines of code.
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In the world of software, the best doesn't always win. What wins is; ubiquity, ease of use, & random market factors. x86 isn't the best architecture out there, Linux isn't the greatest kernel ever developed, PHP can be pretty horrible when used incorrectly, Wordpress's code is complete crap, and yes, JavaScript has some quirks. Some really really smart people at Microsoft, Sun, and Google have all attempted to add another language to the browser, and all have failed so far. The only language that has been successful is something that was created in a few weeks at Netscape. And now, that language is invading the server, and it's going to win. Every single big company on the web is toying with Node right now. During 2011, HP is going to ship tens of millions of computers and phones that has Node as a core component of the OS. The performance goals that the Node dev team are aspiring towards are mind-blowing, and you know what? I think they are going to get there.
So, to answer your question, what are the merits of Node? The "Ease of use" vs "Performance" ratio is going to be off the charts. You may feel more productive in another language. But there are millions of people who are going to enjoy the ease of use to fire up a high performing HTTP server in 3 lines of code.