What's interesting about this talk is that Ryan doesn't even mention Javascript at all (other than briefly to say that NodeJS is built on it) until nearly 13 minutes into the presentation. And it's clear that he's using Javascript as a means to an end -- he's going with Javascript largely just because Javascript by default has a single threaded event loop that every JS programmer had to learn to work with it.
So he brings up going with JS because JS programmers are used to callbacks already -- and then roughly 2 minutes later he immediately moves back to talking about I/O and request handling again. Very little of his presentation is about Javascript beyond an aside of "JS already does this and JS programmers are used to it, so we might as well go with that and try to copy JS conventions." He almost spends more time talking about common SQL libraries than he spends talking about JS.
What's interesting about this talk is that Ryan doesn't even mention Javascript at all (other than briefly to say that NodeJS is built on it) until nearly 13 minutes into the presentation. And it's clear that he's using Javascript as a means to an end -- he's going with Javascript largely just because Javascript by default has a single threaded event loop that every JS programmer had to learn to work with it.
So he brings up going with JS because JS programmers are used to callbacks already -- and then roughly 2 minutes later he immediately moves back to talking about I/O and request handling again. Very little of his presentation is about Javascript beyond an aside of "JS already does this and JS programmers are used to it, so we might as well go with that and try to copy JS conventions." He almost spends more time talking about common SQL libraries than he spends talking about JS.