I admire Vert.x for trying to bring deployability to the separate-non-shared-event-loop world (aka: where Node is): Vert.x has "verticles," which are instantiated multiple times but share no data. It's very similar to node's cluster execution, except Vert.x is a thorough answer to the deployment problem (going as so far as to bake in Hazelcast if you want to scale out from one multi-threaded process to multiple likely-cross-machine processes).

Yet Node itself can not and should not solve the deployment problem: node is a javascript runtime, and contrary to earlier claims I'd declare not opinionated, not one to make this decision for us. The scaling out story is indeed not easy: even tasks like validating session credentials need to be mastered by the team (persist creds into a data-store, or use group communication/pubsub: building for Node is a lot like building for multi-machine Java). The level of DIY-it-ness here are indeed colossal.

What I'd contrast against your view- and I agree with most of your premise, that node is extremely seductive and dangerous and many are apt to get in way way way over their head- is that the comforts you describe are what kill these other languages, what strange and prevent us from becoming better more understanding programmers. Ruby, python, php, less so perl, the webdev that goes on there happens by and large at extreme levels of abstraction: developers flock to the known explored center, the tools with the most, the places that seem safest.

The dangerous dangerous scenario presented by most good web development tools is that it is the tools that know how to run things. Contrary to the charge into the breech throw up ad-hoc platforms in production every day mentality (of node), these (ruby, php, python) platforms stagnate, they fall to the ruin as their tooling strives towards ever reaching greater heights: the tools accrue more and more responsibility, there are better carved out & expected ways to do things, and incidental complexity, the scope of what must be known, how far one has to travel, to get from writing a page to it getting shipped over the wire or executing, balloons.

If anything, Node's core lesson to the world has been about how much is not required. Connect, the only & extremely extremely low-lifed common denominator of Node web world, is the meager-est, tiniest smallest iota of a pluggable middleware system (if only Senchalabs had been courteous enough to be more up front about it being a complete and total rip off Commons-Chain & to not add a thing, I would not bloody loath it). That pattern? bool execute(Context context). Did you handle this request? No? Ok, next. You need to deploy a bunch of processes on a bunch of boxes? You an probably write up something perfectly adequate in a week. Don't have a week? Go find a module: certainly Substack has at least one for whatever your cause (here it's Fleet, https://github.com/substack/fleet).

Node modules are wonderful. They all have some varyingly long list of dependencies, usually the tree is 4-8 different things, but the total amount of code being executed from any given module is almost always short of a couple dozen KB: your engineering team can come in and understand anything in a day or three, and gut it and rebuild it in another day or two. Modules, unlike how development processes have shaped up in hte past decade, are wonderfully delightfully stand-alone: there are no frameworks, no crazy deployment systems, no bloody tooling one is writing to: it's just a couple of functions one can use. The surface area, what is shown, is tiny, is isolated, is understandable, there's no great deep mesh. This runs so contrary to the Drupal, to the Rails, to the Cakes or Faces of the world where one is not writing a language, they're at the eight degree of abstraction writing tools for a library that implements enhancements for a framework that is a piece of an ioc container that runs on a application server that runs on a web server that runs in a runtime that actually does something with the OS.

We need to get more developers willing to charge into the breech and break out a gun fight. This stuff is not that complicated,* and the tools we have are hiding that fact from us more often than not.

So, I admire and love approaches like Vert.x, that take the reactor pattern (what powers Node) and blow it up to the n-th degree, that solve deployment challenges, but at the same time I don't think there is a huge amount of magic there: most node developers have not advanced their runtimes to the level of parity that is called for yet, but this I do not see as a colossal problem. Node, shockingly, even when hideously under tooled, under supported, under op'ed, seems to stand up and not fall over in, in a vast amount of cases. Problems of the rich, good problems to have, when your node system is having worrisome performance problems: most projects will not scale this big, Node will just work, and hopefully you have enough actual genuine talent with enough big picture understanding wtc on your side to not be totally frozen out when your traffic goes up 10x in two days and no one anticipated it. Node is not a land for hand holding, and I don't think that's a bad thing: I think it'll help us listen better to our machines, to not follow our toolings lead into the breech, but to consider what it is we really actually are building for ourselves.