Node was the best choice for our service, I'm willing to go to court with this. We need a fast fire and forget server to talk with Redis continuously, what's a better option? Erlang? I think there are ~3.6 developers in Israel that know Erlang.
For no reason other than it would be a fine alternative. I'm sure your Node solution is performant and simple, and you should stick with that but no doubt a simple server written in ruby or haskell or python or anything really would get the same job done.
This phrase actually captures, succinctly, a big reason for Node's success: If you decide not to use a JavaScript-based tool you have to decide what to use instead. The ensuing debate will often take three times longer than just using Node.
Everyone who touches the web needs to know JavaScript, so apart from any other consideration there's an automatic tendency to try the thing that's written in JavaScript before trying anything else.
I considered EventMachine and Twisted and decided to go with Node. 90% of the requests to the server will be "take this and push it to redis". Another factor in the decision was the other programmer on the project doesn't know Ruby or Python. Another factor was that I'm young, not constrained, and I want to learn everything I can get my hands on.
Sure, that all sounds great. I'm not trying to say you made a bad decision. You're original comment, though, came off as overly forceful, and a mild-bit condescending to the erlang community for no apparent reason and I decided to put my 2 cents in about it. There's no reason why your exact service couldn't be written in another language other than pure personal preference. And thats fine but you need to loosen up a bit about it.
I have more bad things to say about Node :) There are just not enough Erlang hackers around here to consider it, same for Haskell. Even Ruby isn't wildly used around here.
