It created a new world to work with in JS... by copying the async frameworks that already existed in numerous other languages. Innovative within Javascript, sure. Innovative, without further qualifications? Decades too late for that.

> making you rethink your async patterns.

Call me crazy, but I don't consider forcing users to manually transform their code into hard-to-read continuation passing form much of a language innovation.

> node.js created a new world to work with JS, making it more powerful.

Sure, it gave it a new environment to run in, but it didn't make the language any more powerful than applets made Java the language more innovative.

Node's primary innovation is in terms of A) unifying JS on a single high-performance platform and B) creating an ecosystem from the ground up where thread-safety is required at all times.

These innovations are significant, especially at the boots-on-the-ground level. That said, when people speak about lack of innovation in programming languages I think they are looking for more fundamentally new ideas. I don't want to be a cynic—all ideas are derivative after all—but I don't think Node qualifies.

Hmm, I would reckon node.js is popular because of its inherent simplicity and tapping the greater javascript community, which is by far the most vibrant and energetic I have seen.

The things that it introduced - asynchronous, modelling as events, single thread execution - are not really new and already exist as libraries/frameworks [varying in increasing complexity] in Python, Java and Ruby.

Not that I am knocking node. If anything, its good more people are opening up to alternative, sometimes better, ways of modelling and execution.