JavaScript is a great browser scripting language because it's the only browser scripting language. That's a whole realm of good times, and people can and should go nuts with it there.

The problem started a decade or so ago with Node. Too many people only learn JavaScript, become psychologically dependent on it, and they all collectively took it too far outside of a browser.

ECMAScript is a general purpose standard, but it was invented retroactively. Node is not ECMAScript in a server-side ECMAScript engine, it's JavaScript in a browser JavaScript engine. That's just too much of a force fit, and has wasted too much potential for me to say anything positive about it.

Couldn't disagree more. I was a Java programmer for my entire career until about 2015 or so when I switched to Node, and shortly thereafter to TypeScript.

I've commented this many times before, but having a system where everything is on the same tech stack (i.e. front end in TypeScript with React, back end with TypeScript on Node) has resulted in gargantuan productivity gains, especially for a small team where it's trivial for people to cross front end to back end seamlessly. For contrast, I know many teams with a backend in Python and a frontent in React/JS, and I've worked on some teams with that setup. In my opinion it's virtually all downside compared to a backend in TS, as Python and TS are quite similar from a web programming perspective (I'm not referring to Python's advantage in data science tooling), so all it basically is is a barrier to your front end folks being able to make small enhancements on the backend quickly.

Furthermore, TypeScript is a great language and I find myself being so much more productive in it than I was in Java, especially when it comes to refactoring.

JavaScript most definitely has its warts and head scratchers after being around for 25 years, but I feel like most of these oddities (truthy/falsey, typeof null === 'object', undefined vs. null, etc.) can be learned in an hour and written on a half page.

> Furthermore, TypeScript is a great language and I find myself being so much more productive in it than I was in Java, especially when it comes to refactoring.

I don't really see how. TS doesn't seem to solve any annoying problems I previously had in Java. As a concrete example, it would be nice to have the concept of a DTO as a first-class language feature, but alas, I find myself constantly casting and re-casting, plucking, or writing endless wrappers to make sure properties trickle down (or up). Hell, sometimes I just give up and use `any`. I mean, this is a web-first language that has no concept of sending objects over the wire.. okay then.

TypeScript's generics system is cute, but I think it's mostly academic. And did you look at the toolchain? To get TS working, you need babel or ts-node or webpack, and like 3 different .json config files. Importing a package without TS support? You need to write some stubs yourself in types.d.ts. In fact, the best parts of TypeScript are actually JS (await/async, arrow notation, spread operator, etc.).

People are talking the other points to death but on the toolchain front, you might enjoy https://github.com/evanw/esbuild, which is rapidly gaining in popularity. Just 1 thing for bundling, transpilation etc. And its terrifically fast since its written in Go (ironic I know).

But there is also sucrase which is fast because.. its written in TypeScript? https://github.com/alangpierce/sucrase