But there’s some truly awful stuff in the ecosystem; in the underlying language and the platform’s DNA; in the compromises TS (rightly) makes to be a productive real world tool; in the commonly used tooling; and just peppered throughout everything you can expect to encounter in common third party libraries.

Overcoming all that awfulness requires a lot of additional effort, is inherently limited, and isn’t common in the community (although that too is improving as TS becomes more popular, and as safer patterns become more idiomatic).

I think if I were building a new greenfield project with my choice of platform today, it would be a difficult choice whether to take all that I’ve learned in Node/TS and accept those trade-offs, or to invest in learning another platform.

What other platform do you have in mind?

But I think off the top of my head, languages that I’d look at as first contenders include F#, C#, Kotlin, Swift. I’m sure there are other good choices, for the kind of space I tend to work, that are equally productive and have enough of a community for me to be comfortable adopting them, but I would need to spend some more time researching options to really say with confidence what else I would consider.

All tied in with one singular company each that calls all the shots - For good and for bad. You kinda get all their other stuff showed down your throat along with the languages and things can get bloated fast. But at least things are streamlined. Nodejs had an uprising with io.js in 2014-15 and is now governed by a foundation. I like that a lot. I sleep soundly knowing that no company can pull the rug from under me on a whim.

  for (var i = 1; i != Math.pow(2, 16); i <<= 1)

(It's been a while since I coded PHP, but my recollection is that PHP tries to pull a strings-are-integer tricks a few times).

Yeah, the implicit casting in PHP is bonkers, especially when it comes to comparisons. The comparison table looks like the scribblings of a madman: https://www.php.net/manual/en/types.comparisons.php

(though granted, Javascript acts very similarly.)

That said, after ten years of use, I still see something like:

    function_returning_false_or_int() > -1

Now, nobody should write that shit in the first place, but turns out it’s equivalent to ‘!== false’.

‘(int)false’ is zero, but ‘false > -1’... is not true.