"I wasted a lot of time trying to learn node and do something useful with it (other than a dumb file server), but couldn’t. I just didn’t really know where to begin...The APIs might have been documented, but it wasn’t clear how to piece things together to make something useful."
I haven't had this problem myself. To me, piecing together different libraries in Node feels much the same as it does in any other language. You find the libraries via Google, you learn the APIs, and you write glue code to hook them in to your business logic. I'm not sure what would make Node at all different in this respect.
"The async-style of programming is almost entirely inaccessible to my brain."
I'm guessing you're referring to the mess of ultra-deep, nested callbacks that plagues many Node apps. If you just keep nesting callback after callback, then yes, your code will be ugly and unmaintainable. But there are solutions to this. Look into control flow libraries like Step.
"So what exactly is your excuse for choosing Node.JS as your backend platform?"
Here's my main reason. When building for the web, Node can sometimes be far more maintainable than many other platforms. That's because you can share code between client and server. Admittedly, the community hasn't yet settled on a best practice for implementing client-server code sharing. But folks have found ways to do it that work, and you can just pick one that feels good. Sharing code is a big maintainability improvement if you have a thick client that knows a lot about business logic.
I haven't had this problem myself. To me, piecing together different libraries in Node feels much the same as it does in any other language. You find the libraries via Google, you learn the APIs, and you write glue code to hook them in to your business logic. I'm not sure what would make Node at all different in this respect.
"The async-style of programming is almost entirely inaccessible to my brain."
I'm guessing you're referring to the mess of ultra-deep, nested callbacks that plagues many Node apps. If you just keep nesting callback after callback, then yes, your code will be ugly and unmaintainable. But there are solutions to this. Look into control flow libraries like Step.
"So what exactly is your excuse for choosing Node.JS as your backend platform?"
Here's my main reason. When building for the web, Node can sometimes be far more maintainable than many other platforms. That's because you can share code between client and server. Admittedly, the community hasn't yet settled on a best practice for implementing client-server code sharing. But folks have found ways to do it that work, and you can just pick one that feels good. Sharing code is a big maintainability improvement if you have a thick client that knows a lot about business logic.