For me it was the cross-platform batteries-included standard library, which could completely replace Windows batch files and UNIX shell scripts with a single so

For me it was the cross-platform batteries-included standard library, which could completely replace Windows batch files and UNIX shell scripts with a single solution that was also much more convenient to write. At that time node.js was still a decade into the future. Today I'm starting to move from Python to Deno though. I'm still fed up with how bad the Python2 to Python3 transition went, and Python3 has all the wrong goals for what I'm using it for (it tries to be a "real" programming language, when I just want a cross-platform scripting language).