Its ridiculous to compare the take up of an execution environment to that of new programming languages. Of course it takes MUCH longer for a language to get traction than for a simple piece of infrastructure using a language that has been around for 14 years (at the time of node's inception).
Many packages in npm are just code which has been around for quite some time before npm existed or it comes from the client and was repackaged for node (underscore, backbone, jquery ...). So to make the comparison fair, lets divide 26,966 by 18 years of JavaScript: 1496/year. Not bad, but certainly far from game changing considerin the inclusion of JS in all major browsers gave that language an initial boost that Ruby and Python never had...
Many packages in npm are just code which has been around for quite some time before npm existed or it comes from the client and was repackaged for node (underscore, backbone, jquery ...). So to make the comparison fair, lets divide 26,966 by 18 years of JavaScript: 1496/year. Not bad, but certainly far from game changing considerin the inclusion of JS in all major browsers gave that language an initial boost that Ruby and Python never had...