> The decrease in productivity with node comes from having to write everything with callbacks. Programming asynchronously is crazy, it makes very simple algorithms very annoying to write.

I know exactly what you mean, because that's what I thought a year ago. I was going on and on about this to everyone. Mea culpa.

Then I actually tried node and learned the functional side of JavaScript (I don't mean the semantics, which are very simple; I mean powerful LISPish design patterns). Now I don't think about callbacks anymore, because I have a functional toolkit that mostly hides them.

You say asynchronous coding makes simple algorithms annoying to write. So let's have an example. Read two files -- in parallel -- trap I/O errors and warn about them, otherwise merge and sort the files by line, write the result to a third file, and warn about I/O errors there as well. Simple enough?

My solution is 8 lines, formatted. It was very pleasant to write.

  fork(
    ['lines.txt', 'lines2.txt'].map(function(name) {
      return fs.readFile.bind(fs, name);
    }),
    check(console.warn.bind(console), function(a) {
      fs.writeFile('linesOut.txt', a.sum().split('\n').sort().join('\n'), check(console.warn.bind(console)));
    })
  )

If you've seen enough JS to deduce what the lib definitions for fork() and check() might be, then this code will seem obvious -- almost trivial. Otherwise, you will probably claim shenanigans or 'spaghetti' because it doesn't look like insert favorite programming language/framework here.

So it saddens me to hear people whining about this aspect of node -- partly because it recalls my own naivety, and partly because I know from experience that they're missing out on something great.