Well, in the real world people tend not to fork from within a webserver.
in the real world, forgetting "var" doesn't bring down web servers.
In the real world people use node.js for other stuff that web servers. Like background processing that involves a lot of I/O, therefore the bias against spawning a shell has no ground.
I have noticed a popular aversion to "fork", and I don't quite understand it. It uses the "copy on write" technique, and it seems very fast in my benchmarks. For example, I have a benchmark where I can spawn 1000 or more processes right from the command line, all banging away on shared files with locking, and it all seems very fast and stable, every time. I don't even bother with pre-forking. But I do make heavy use of "Keep-Alive", with appropriate guards against abuse under heavy load. I'm a big fan of the simplicity of fork and blocking I/O, but I'm sure other people have different requirements and constraints they might want to share here.
Spawning a new process is not the same thing as forking, but people often forget this bit. This post wasn't about forking.
I thought that spawning a new process was the same as forking. What am I missing?