I mean Node. I find writing Node in JS intolerable.

ESM, --watch, and TS syntax support is the combo that makes it all good!

Well, only goes to show how different everyone's experiences are. I guess I've had the opposite one: Node+CommonJS was something I was extremely comfortable with.

The slow adoption of ESM by Node, with many compatibility missteps, the thousand papercuts around TS, the way frontend-centric toolchains kinda-sorta paper over the whole thing, letting it fester, and the way people have been acting like things are ready for primetime for over a decade while diligently testing them in production, all of that came later. To the point of having me wondering how did people work with TypeScript before ~5.4 - though evidently they did, and had few if any of the same complaints!

Baffling but IIWII. Anyway, only this year I discovered a pure `tsx` + ESM workflow had become viable OOTB, to no little surprise. I perceive that as the toolchain becoming unfucked just as randomly as it became fucked when Node 16 did what it did. Not that it didn't take a couple years for TS to "invent" the right compiler flags that it took to tell it to stay out of the runtime's way, too.

So a good year overall. Hope they don't break it again because when they do it's an uphill struggle to convince them that they have.