i have used nodejs for all of my personal projects for years (almost 10?) now. my reasons are: * JS has the largest developer and runtime install base * JS is very competitive with Go/Java on performance and the runtime (v8) actually improves on cpu/memory performance over time * you get a UI that supports everything on all major platforms (the browser) for free * the apps i write are generally IO heavy and so the async event driven model is very useful to have as a 1st class feature * starting with an async event driven language/runtime makes it very easy to decompose your app if you want to split something out into a separate service * i know js, and work with it professionally already, and it has a large market for professional dev work, so everything i learn in my personal projects increases my value as a professional