I don't think any of those except "years of experience" are valid points against the use of Node.js, and even that isn't really on the mark with reality. This is because Age !== Experience. Perl has been around longer than Python, but it sounds like you wouldn't want to use it. Granted, Node.js is still considered <i>fairly</i> new, but remember - it <i>was</i> released in 2009. We're a few months away from 2014, and this has been more than enough time for Node.js to mature just enough to be suitable in a production web app.<p>I'm not advocating the use of one over the other for you (personally I'd go with Node because my expertise in it outweighs my expertise in Python), I'm simply stating my opinion that these are not valid reasons to disregard the technology. The Node.js community is bustling, the amount of modules available on NPM are in the tens of thousands, and many open source projects use it (Yeoman, Grunt, Stylus, Jade, Roole, LESS, Bower, CoffeeScript to name a few).<p>Development speed is likely the most probable of your points, but even so - you can write a Node.js app in CoffeeScript, which you might be more inclined to do since your love of Python is so prominent, and CoffeeScript borrows many ideas from Python, such as significant whitespace and chained comparisons. A manual compile step isn't necessary as this feature can be done by most IDE's implicitly. Express.js also helps big time.<p>The only reason I would use Python over Node (if I was in your position <i>and</i> actually knew enough Python) would be if the web app in question required intensive mathematical or scientific calculations - Python would shine over Node in that respect.