Moreover, Node.js's non-blocking, single-threaded nature is great for the kinds of plumbing that things web services and related applications require (The stuff we used to call "database-to-web" applications -- i.e., fetch some content from a data-store and render it and/or accept some content from a client and store it) but seems like a pretty poor match for disk I/O and CPU-bound applications like a database.
And I'm saying this as someone that's actually a big fan of JavaScript and that does a fair amount of enterprise-scale work with it.
EDIT: I meant to add: But, I think this might be beside the point. If you are looking for a language than a large number of people can more-or-less read and write, JS is a pretty good choice. If your objective is teachablity/readability rather than production-quality performance or capabilities, I think JS is probably on the short-list of candidate languages.
I can't find the quote offhand but I think Douglas Crockford or someone like that described JavaScript as "the only language people feel comfortable using without learning the syntax". (This was especially true prior to server-side applications like Node.js, when JS was largely considered a toy-like language for scripting basic input validations). If nothing else, this makes JS a reasonable "executable pseudo-code"--something practically any programming can read and probably most can execute.