Clarity of syntax is a matter of opinion (personally, I agree that Python is clearer than JS... Java, not so much.)
Implying that JavaScript can't "run at a useful speed" is wrong, using modern implementations. This is especially true for code that runs through lots of repetition as the just-in-time compilers in the JS engines do a remarkable job.
Not to mention that viewing JS as a UI-oriented language seems a bit out of date given the 40k or so packages for Node.js that are in npm.
JavaScript of today is pretty different than JS of 2007, and there are more changes coming with generators, iterators, destructuring, class syntax, arrow functions, promises, etc.
While I disagree with the comment you're responding to, and agree with yours, there are some interesting problems doing resource heavy operations in ML/NLP in an environment like Node that's inherently single threaded.
I'm actually adding multi-threading to classifier training in node-natural as we speak [0] so it's something I'm recently familiar with. Multi-threading in JS isn't new or particularly exciting (even less so is multithreading in ML/NLP applications) but the marriage of the two has led to a few interesting problems in JS's asynchronous/event based view of the world!
That's a good point. Of course, the problems with shared mutable state are well-documented and I'm glad that JavaScript hasn't headed down that path. But you're right that Node doesn't have good, mature solutions for that yet (short of your central data store option)
Implying that JavaScript can't "run at a useful speed" is wrong, using modern implementations. This is especially true for code that runs through lots of repetition as the just-in-time compilers in the JS engines do a remarkable job.
Not to mention that viewing JS as a UI-oriented language seems a bit out of date given the 40k or so packages for Node.js that are in npm.
JavaScript of today is pretty different than JS of 2007, and there are more changes coming with generators, iterators, destructuring, class syntax, arrow functions, promises, etc.