Now there's all the hype lately about Node.JS, an event driven framework using Javascript callbacks. To my limited understanding, its primary advantage seems to be that you don't have to wait step by step sequentially (for example, you can fetch the SQL results, while calling other functions too).

So my question is: how is this different, or better than just functional languages, like CL, Haskell, Clojure etc? If not better, then why don't people just do functional languages then (instead of reinventing the wheel with Javascript)?

Please note that I have none experience in either Node.JS nor functional programming. So some basic explanation can be helpful.