This is the best answer so far.

My first language was Basic. Taught myself in 7th grade robotics class. I made the robot dance :)

The problem here, which I haven't seen anyone else address, is that comparing Express to something like Laravel or Django is not really accurate. Express is not as opinionated as Laravel or Django. Flask would be a better comparison. Laravel and Django start off with so much more boilerplate to save time for developers. Granted to can npm install a bunch of crap and create your own super duper express build. As far as performance goes, what are you trying to accomplish? Are you just building a REST API? Are you doing processor intensive things such as image manipulation? PHP can be tweaked, as can python, and node is just pretty damn fast. You can run django and php so many different ways. It's really tough to answer this without being biased and full of crap.