I watched it last weekend, and from what I understood/remember from the talk the reason the node people picked javascript was not because they liked javascript. It was because they wanted to do async programming, and they found other languages had too much synchronous baggage. In javascript, node.js could start from a clean slate and build a pure async culture and environment.
This tech talk on node is pretty interesting
http://sna-projects.com/blog/2011/08/nodejs/
I watched it last weekend, and from what I understood/remember from the talk the reason the node people picked javascript was not because they liked javascript. It was because they wanted to do async programming, and they found other languages had too much synchronous baggage. In javascript, node.js could start from a clean slate and build a pure async culture and environment.