Other people basically covered it but yeah my problem is how `request` comes out of nowhere. The NodeJS snippet is way more obvious, treating the two handlers as separate (`app.get`, `app.post`) is cleaner, and it's immediately obvious what's happening, no need to know about `flask.request` to undrestand the code. I have come to abhor non-obvious code, and on that metric the flask code loses by a step in my mind.

If we really want to get in the weeds, we could talk about python 2.x's floundering around async IO -- IIRC Twisted/Tornado/Gevent/Eventlet were all close to equally good options (and thus mindshare was split) while node had it built in, with a virtualenv-by-default packaging system. Also there's WSGI -- the interoperability it provides is cool, but also means more moving parts than a simple node+express setup.

I don't want to make this a nodejs vs python thing, because that's a really dumb conversation (argument) to try and have, but personally node+express is what I pick over python+flask any day of the week for spinning up simple "just-good-enough" web services. These days I've been checking out Molten and Falcon (I'm a huge fan of pypy) but when I need to build a quick server I just pick up node+typescript.