Pleasure to me means I can sleep at night knowing whatever system I’ve built will remain online when subsystems fail, and will self-heal when infrastructure goes down.

When it comes to a career change I’d focus less on lang/stack and more on engineering culture, approach, practice. A team that builds good software, regardless of language or stack, will be a pleasure to work with.

I think that functional programming ideals lend themselves to this nicely. Specifically: data as a first principle, with actions/mutations/calculations of that data being separate.