Thanks, I hadn't heard of Ousterhout's dichotomy. It sounds unhelpful, and like an excuse for users of compiled languages to be supercilious about interpreted languages.
A "scripting language" should, if it means anything, mean a language used for writing "scripts". So it hinges on the definition of "script". IMO, a reasonable definition of script might be something like "A computer program comprising a sequence of commands executed for their side effects, whose primary purpose is neither reusability as a software library nor to act as a robust component of a long-running or frequent process, and therefore may not be thoroughly organized into functions, classes, methods etc."
node.js can be used as a scripting language, but the primary role of javascript is to run in a web browser and implement a GUI with an event loop, which is very different from "scripting", if you accept a definition similar to mine.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ousterhout%27s_dichotomy