@Jan, in NodeJS if you need to test against null and undefined, you are really doing something wrong ... misinterpretation of functional paradigm leads to such cases. I have no such code in my financial solution at all. Please, do not want to see Java or any other imperative language reflecting in JS code.

I hope the time will come soon when quality is not measured by weight and when history and past glory has no value in any professional IT debate...

BTW, for computation-intensive services, Python is much-much better than Java. Java is overbloated, an unisex ageless bespoke t-shirt meant for male and female, for casual and street, for oxford and disco, for children and people in golden age...

@Jan: real-time transaction management system means a financial system, where transactions must be relayed between financial entities and payment providers. Basically all financial action you or your company is involved when dealing with money. Loans, reconciliations, transfers, asset management, etc. Fragmented in space and time of course restricted by hundreds of business rules and standards involving multiple transfer formats... Java has no chance to outperform Node in I/O operations. About computational power, JS is not designed to calculate heavy math-related complex structures, but you invoke some C++ library for it for performance beyond the reach of native Java. NodeJS is not for everything, but definitely not a toy anymore. It is a real EE key player not smaller than Java even if the focus is deviating.

I designed and implemented a real-time transaction management system using NodeJS for a swiss bank recently, and NodeJS has been proven a miracle... Not to mention Paypal, who is also using NodeJS for transaction management....