It was really fun work, because even the 'simple' stuff we built had to address some of the big traffic issues you'd normally have at a much larger scale and the work was usually very high concept or cutting edge. It would've been a nightmare to maintain for longer than a week though.
I prefer python in general but for zero-to-simple-web-endpoint I may pick Node.
Sure, but that wasn't the argument; GP talked specifically about async and websockets, which are areas where Java is particularly weak, but areas that I was surprised would be required for a PoC at all.
Asking, because I do most of my development in Clojure and find it much nicer than Node both for POC and production. There's also self-hosted Clojurescript now that runs without a dependency on JVM.
I've only just played around with Clojure and I've written a middling amount of Groovy, but the vast majority of it involved Jenkins build pipelines, so I don't really count it.
Between having a REPL, near instaneous stop/relaunch times, and doing in 8 lines of Node.js what takes me 70 lines using CompletableFutures, I'm still going to reach for Node to prove the idea.
Now, when it takes hold and looks like it might stick around, it immediately gets turned into a Java project. Or, if the event we were building for is over, it basically just gets deleted- which pretty much says it all in my opinion.
It's not a toy language, there's some real usefulness to it, but just like anything else, there's a time and place. Currently, that place is NOT production.