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This. I grew up with Lisp and Smalltalk, yeah I am that old, but today I love Node to build web apps.

It’s a fantastic environment for asynchronous programming. It also has a built-in REPL for a management interface via TCP or Unix sockets. It doesn’t really need any additional packages (I hate the dependency hell that npm saddles you with, and people don’t seem to know that Node already has http, https, and websocket upgrades built in, so you often don’t need any “frameworks” or libraries).

Give me Node, and I can build an entire web app from scratch. Most of the time you don’t even need to use JS in the browser. Just html and CSS are enough. Web apps the way God intended.

I don’t use Typescript either. Its type checking isn’t worth the hassle of poor tooling and inscrutable stack traces.

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IMHO, TypeScript is only useful if you are using a build tool because it requires so much configuration. I switched to WebPack for very large Electron projects and I'm hooked on it. The syntactic sugar protects me from myself, and the importing is cleaner. I also finally made the switch to VSCode, which while bloated and awkward to configure, is pretty dang amazing when working correctly w.r.t. linting and code inspection.

Lot's of projects are popping up using ElectronJS, which is Node+Chromium. I have written many, and they are literally write-once-run-everywhere. Node serialport and node libusb have some speed issues on macOS, but require literally no alteration, utterly seamless.

The idea as "Node is just web" is dead in the water. Hugely popular ElectronJS(Node) apps are:

* Saleae - An inexpensive logic analyzer - https://www.saleae.com/

* Balena - a flash programmer for SDmicro and USB drives - https://www.balena.io/etcher/

* BetaFlight Configurator - the seminal drone (quad/hex/octo) configuration tool - https://github.com/betaflight/betaflight-configurator

[FYI: Python is far, far behind in packaging cross-platform apps and requires gigabytes of support libraries. People complain about Electron size, but they are only comparing it to native apps.]