Actually it's more like this: That ugly language called Javascript that everyone derided and said was "too shit and slow to ever write a Demo in" back in the 90s when all the "real developers" were writing server side scripts in Perl and left the frontend people to their own devices caught up with them. They kept pushing the boundaries, discovering things like XMLHttpRequest, and using that crap little language. Eventually big players like Google started throwing a lot of money at the problem and Javascript became usable enough to write apps in. The front end people that all the cool Perl kids derided needed something on the backend. They wern't going to touch Perl since by this time it was an old languishing dinosaur and there was a bad taste left in their mouth. And thus NodeJS was born. The frontend dev could write his server side stuff in the one language he knew.

This is my completely biased and highly selective history of events ;)