The benefit of node is not in the language selection, though JavaScript does have it's advantages as well as drawbacks. The real elegance of Node is that it provides a low level server toolbox that you can rapidly build high level frameworks and applications on top off. I was never really taken by the hype but we decided to use it on a project and I was really surprised how quick it was to set up a REST layer for our app using Node. That's really it's greatest benefit you can bolt together some pretty impressive network based applications pretty quickly.