People use Python and JS-based webservers not for their performance, but because they like the languages. And those languages were designed not for speed or concurrency but for other things, like expresiveness.
Erlang was designed with performance and concurrency in mind, and if it didn't beat the pants off of Python and JS servers, I'd be shocked.
Not that that means it's the right choice for all things. Performance isn't everything, being able to write code in Python is a good enough reason to use something like Django.
I agree. It's interesting to see node fans get huffy when Erlang people say, "hey, we're still #1"
But for people who already love JS, node is a dream come true. It's really fast. Not as fast as Erlang, but more than fast enough to justify building massive projects in it. Assuming you are one of those that loves, or believes in, JavaScript...
Personally, yes. I like to use eventlet in Python partially because of that. Interacting with the scheduler is implicit in eventlet (and gevent, which some prefer) so you write code that looks synchronous.
On top of that, you get nonblocking I/O almost for free, similar to what node attempts to provide, where instead of real nonblocking I/O the system will make blocking I/O look like it's nonblocking. Scala does this too.
But, users of Twisted could also use inLineCallbacks for a similar feel, though it's not required. I'm curious if Node.js could just build the same?
I'm not sure about step, but caolan's async is perfectly usable in the browser, as well as in node.
That said, code sharing between browser and server often extends to templating, validation and a few utilities, in my experience. More complex logic is better served with message passing or something like dnode.
That's not quite fair. Erlang was designed from the start to be very, very fast at process switching and message passing. True, that design took a while to bear fruit, but my understanding (from listening to Joe Armstrong speak about it) is that being able to make the core of the language highly efficient was a goal from the start.
People use Python and JS-based webservers not for their performance, but because they like the languages. And those languages were designed not for speed or concurrency but for other things, like expresiveness.
Erlang was designed with performance and concurrency in mind, and if it didn't beat the pants off of Python and JS servers, I'd be shocked.
Not that that means it's the right choice for all things. Performance isn't everything, being able to write code in Python is a good enough reason to use something like Django.