If you gauge popularity to be the number of questions people ask about a system then you are right -- people are asking a lot about node.js. However, you should not stop there: Google Trends shows that Perl has only lost a tiny bit of popularity compared with the plummeting interest in node.js over the past five years. Now, I'm no statistics expert but there appears to be a correlation here -- perhaps people are asking for help more and at the same time losing interest. It might be that they are running into real, almost insurmountable problems with node.js, turn to online sites seeking help, and are then giving up for something else.