Python 3.4 may help a lot with the language mechanisms (with asyncio, pluggable event loops, and composable generators everywhere), but there's still the issue of getting library support to use all of that.
Node.js isn't actually better - it uses the callback model of async programming, which should be familiar to any C++ programmer who's been writing servers since the 80s, both because it's the current best solution for writing scalable event-driven servers and because it sucks.
For ease of programming a CSP-based language like Go or Erlang is really the way to go, but then you're back to the "lack of library support" problem that you'd get with Python 3.4, except worse because Python at least has libraries for the synchronous part of the computation.
> Node.js isn't actually better - it uses the callback model of async programming,
The point is not about the code style, it's that since Node is 'asynchronous by default,' culturally, Node produces libraries that are also asynchronous by default. Most Ruby or Python libraries aren't.
> but there's still the issue of getting library support to use all of that.
Much of Node's success in employing the event loop model comes from not having extensive libraries of blocking I/O code to work around. Maybe the difficulty of the 2-to-3 Python migration could be a boon here.
Good news as you can now use ES6 generators in Node.js and when combined with another ES6 feature, Promises it can result in much nicer async code e.g. http://taskjs.org/
ES6 is looking very nice indeed, great thing is that with Node you won't have to worry about old browser support.
Node.js isn't actually better - it uses the callback model of async programming, which should be familiar to any C++ programmer who's been writing servers since the 80s, both because it's the current best solution for writing scalable event-driven servers and because it sucks.
For ease of programming a CSP-based language like Go or Erlang is really the way to go, but then you're back to the "lack of library support" problem that you'd get with Python 3.4, except worse because Python at least has libraries for the synchronous part of the computation.