Yes but my point is that this doesn't address the OP's frustration: learning new APIs without a clear sense of what one is getting out of it. Many of Deno's fun

Yes but my point is that this doesn't address the OP's frustration: learning new APIs without a clear sense of what one is getting out of it. Many of Deno's fundamental features are basically framework features. Learning the Deno for-await API for answering HTTP requests is an identical experience to learning a framework that offers that API. "But Deno has fundamental performance improvements" -- Frameworks can also offer fundamental performance improvements. In fact, I can write a Rust-backed binary package for node.js and now we're really in a grey area. The point is that "its a runtime not a framework" is not an answer as to why he should learn it or not. At least, not without attaching to it a meaningful explanation as to the benefits he'll get from it because its a runtime, but at that point, we're back where we started: just pitch him on what he'll get out of it, don't correct him on technical terminology.