Being able to reuse the code you wrote for the server in your client code and vice versa, is in my opinion not just a small feature, it can save you a lot of ti

Being able to reuse the code you wrote for the server in your client code and vice versa, is in my opinion not just a small feature, it can save you a lot of time and money. I joined a company where the backend was written in PHP and the frontend in javascript. There was a ton of duplicate code, just because the backend and the frontend had been written in different languages. By using UMD modules and switching our backend from PHP to nodejs by building a custom isomorphic framework saved us a lot of time. We now don't have two development teams but just one, it's really great having everyone write (speak) the same language and makes hiring, sharing knowledge and training much more efficient. Yeah javascript is not perfect, but I disagree that is totally bad and that you can't write good code with it. We also use typescript because it is not just about types it does much more for us. For example allows us to write our code in ES6/ES7 (with core-js) and transpiles it on the fly (on save file) to ES5 UMD modules. Visual Studio and the nodejs tools make it easy to debug our backend code.