I can say why I chose it and why I no longer choose it anymore. For me, JavaScript was the price I had to pay for a number of other benefits. I don't like the l

I can say why I chose it and why I no longer choose it anymore. For me, JavaScript was the price I had to pay for a number of other benefits. I don't like the language, but TypeScript, Coffeescript and the like can paper over some of the deficiencies well enough. But what Node is is more than just JavaScript. It's a fast, well-designed runtime written in C++ with the event loop as a central construct. It's an ecosystem where async is the default and you don't have to work hard to get performance and scalability in that area. And it has a fantastic package management tool. The quality of the packages that npm installs may not always be high, but the tool itself is so much better than pip, maven/gradle, gem, cpan, etc. I've moved on from Node because I've found nearly all the benefits of Node available in Rust. Rust has the performance of Node's C++ runtime, easy event loop with tokio, and cargo is the one package manager that I think betters npm. And with wasm, we're even starting to see the possibility of sharing code between the server-side and client-side. Add to that the ability to use it anywhere that Node can be used (I'm using Rust now with Lambda without a single line of JavaScript), and there's now no reason for me to put up with the hassles that using such a poorly-designed language as JavaScript imposes.