🐍 Node or Python for learning backend after React?

About a year of React now and I feel okay with frontend stuff. So I've decided it's time to learn backend too, properly this time. Goal is simple. I want to build a whole project on my own without waiting for anyone. Right now every idea I have dies at the point where it needs a server. Obvious pick is Node, since it's still JavaScript and I already know the syntax. That way I'd only be learning backend ideas, not a whole new language together. But a few people I asked keep telling me to go with Python instead. They say it reads cleaner for beginners and the learning curve is gentler overall. My worry is learning a new language and new concepts together will slow me down. Maybe that's a fair price for cleaner code, I just can't judge it yet. I haven't written a single line of either one on the server side. So everything I say here is just guessing from other people's opinions. I don't have a fixed career plan for backend work either, no big goal. I just want to be the person who can finish a project end to end. A friend of mine said to pick one and stick with it for 3 months. Sounds sensible, though it doesn't tell me which one to pick, which is the whole problem. If you learned backend after frontend, did staying with the same language make things smoother? Or did switching to something new turn out fine once you got going? Please tell me what you'd do differently if you started again today. Also happy to hear if the answer is just pick whichever and go.

I did Python first and then Node a year later, and both were fine. Syntax wasn't the hard part. Understanding requests, databases and why things break took most of my time. If you already know JavaScript, I'd say stay with it and save the new language for later. One small project that stores real data teaches more than any amount of comparing languages.

Started with Node for the same reason you are leaning that way, already knew JavaScript and did not want to juggle two new things at once. No regrets there, but a friend who went Python first said the syntax made loops and functions click faster for her since there is less punctuation to trip over. Backend concepts themselves took longer to sink in than the syntax did for me.