I agree it's over-hyped (over-rating it would be too much, after all). Only kids would write a serious backend using JavaScript. In fact, startups write in these languages as long as they're startups. If they go past this stage, they generally move to Java, at least for the backend. Node has its own merits, no doubt about it. But Java and JavaScript are not even comparable: the first is a serious programming language, object oriented, strongly typed, with a solid and top-of-the-line concurrency model, formalized by an open community (JCP) , baked by Oracle, implemented by software engineers for software engineers. The latter is a scripting language, weakly typed, badly interpreted, without a consistent implementation across all platforms, made by an ancient old-style committee (ECMA) for script kiddies who probably don't even know what a big-O notation is. Come on, stop comparing apples to oranges. Stop comparing scripting languages to real programming languages.