SOSomeCallMeTim·Dec 9, 2016
A key advantage that Node has? NPM with 350,000 packages.
Granted they aren't all top quality packages, but thousands are.
I was working on one project that used ZeroMQ, as a random example. There are excellent packages for Node, including a well maintained version for the newest 4.0 branch.
For Elixir, when a team wanted to interface using ZeroMQ, the best they could find was a "work in progress, not ready for production use" build that was a partial re-implementation of ZeroMQ 3.1, and that specifically lacked the elliptic encryption feature that we were using. The more mature ports to Erlang similarly doesn't support the encryption we were using. [1] There's one native binding that seems to only support 3.1 (at most) as well [2], but it's something you need to build and configure, as opposed to "npm install zeromq --save", or better ye
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t, "yarn add zeromq", and then your project will work on any system without any complex build rules to get it working.
That's just one package that I tried to use, and it's a popular network message queue package (two full ports to native Erlang!). If I had tried to do something more obscure I'm sure I would have had even more problems.
Another key advantage is that there are probably 10x the number of developers ready to hit the ground running on a Node project than there are Go developers, or 50x as many as Elixir or Erlang developers. I don't know if you've tried to do much hiring, but it's hard enough finding developers for a language that's popular. (And no, I'm not counting "front end" JavaScript developers; if I were, I would have said 100x or more.) If you're hiring in an area that isn't highly tech focused, you might not be able to hire a single developer with experience.
[1] https://github.com/zeromq/ezmq/issues/31 and https://github.com/chovencorp/chumak (supports only the "NULL" security framework -- there's a note lower down on the page that Curve isn't supported)
[2] https://github.com/zeromq/erlzmq2