> I love legacy codebases.
> A legacy codebase means that the product is performing well. It means that I can often make immediate and impactful improvements.
Wow. This person must have worked on very different legacy codebases than me.
Legacy Javascript code, to me, is something that I do not want to touch with a 10 foot pole, because every little piece of it can be intertwined with and used by many other hidden places. Plus, I've never found a legacy JS codebase that has a robust test suite, so any refactoring I do can be hard to test and verify.
From a practicality perspective, I get that the best programming language is the one you can use to build your product, but I tend to long for languages like C# or even Go when I'm trying to deliver a product on a team with 10+ people. Static typing really helps when you're interfacing with someone elses code, and Typescript only aids this point.
Maybe if your target audience is genuinely 10 year olds learning to code, fine. But also if you're building a serious product for a company, please don't choose a "Janky programming language" because I really don't want to have to debug it after you left before really thinking about sanitizing user input.
I feel like, in the hands of a really talented programmer, they can be super productive in PHP or Javascript or really anything. But I've just had a lot of bad experiences with quickly written, undocumented code.