I really like the kind of sanity that TypeScript brings to JS, super well designed and usually a pleasure to work with. That said, I've worked in many languages and I can't see any reason you would willing write your backend in JS or TypeScript.

Java, C#, Rails, and to some extent Python are much saner choices. The massive churn of the JS ecosystem bleeds through to the backend, hard.

JS could use a little more of the cruft and process that makes Java and C# especially so "uninteresting".

Java especially is kind of a joy to work in if you ignore the cruft. Everything is generally well documented, the libraries are mostly very solid, code is almost always backwards compatible, there isn't a zillion ways to do everything, frameworks tend to live for a decade or so.

And it's faster than JS, and uses way less memory, and mostly solved dependency hell and bloat over a decade ago.

Java feels like it was designed, not grown. Everything follows similar convention so it's easy to pick up new libraries. The advantages are many. The drawbacks are few as long as you use things like Lombok and code generation liberally. By the way; code generation using agents, annotation processors, and bytecode manipulation is pretty much standard and a godsend for doing interesting things (and getting around the cruft) .

In java, I can write code on the fly at runtime, or even during compile time using standard tools. Js barely even supports reflection. This is a huge underrated shortcoming of js if you're doing anything complicated

Sympathies to your valid concerns ...

Though Java was 'designed', it was not 'designed' to be an http/web server.

JS, particularly Node.js has really adapted itself to that well.

And one small but massive difference: JSON is how data is passed and it fits seamlessly into Javascript, and doing JSON in Java is an ugly, ugly thing.

As soon as you compare not JS/Java, but Java/Tomcat vs. JS/NodeJS - then you get a different comparison.

I quite like using Typescript on Node.js over Java - development speed is faster, and this is a really important thing.

JSON is how some data is passed today. It's certainly not the best way and might go out of style just like XML did a while ago.

It is already on its way out, thanks to gRPC and need for performance instead of parsing text all the time.

It is only a matter of browsers getting native support for gRPC.

It's available now! Yay! [1]

With gPRC there's still a lot of binding code, and you need to map all of that in Java, but you do get some validation etc. out of it. It does make the 'data transfer' comparison a little less harsh.

[1] https://github.com/grpc/grpc-web