&gt; Isn&#x27;t that true for many platforms?<p>I would say that the ROI is lower for time spent learning Node. I&#x27;ve found that with all the other languages I&#x27;ve learnt, in a couple of days I&#x27;ve been able to build something useful, leave it running in production and reuse skills learned a year later.<p>With Node, even the name of the language is not stable! A few weeks back I went to install Zombie, and now I have to install iojs and not Node. Assumedly it&#x27;s now Node again. If you live and breathe the language, subscribe to the mailing lists, go to the meetups, etc, these things might be obvious. But when you&#x27;re just dipping in and out, it really dents your confidence in the language.