Meh, I learned modern JavaScript and dove deep into how JS works over the last year and I think it’s probably one of my favorite dynamic languages if not my most favorite one. The syntax is a nice sweet spot, the semantics make more sense in most situations than Ruby or Python, the lacking standard library has been more than made up for by third part packages. I’d love to work in JS in the future which isn’t something I’d have said 10 years ago and especially not 20 years ago.
Dunno, small stdlib-like extensions are the absolute most trivial 3rd party dependencies. Like let's say they use Lodash.
Definitely not the hard part of maintaining a legacy dynamically-typed application. And I'd say it's the most trivial part.
And your assertion suggests that it's somehow rare to have to maintain code? I'm sure the person you replied to has maintained code for more than a year and is drawing part of their post from that experience.
Just be careful about what third party packages you are using. It's not like users of other languages don't have the same problem (Case in point: I earn my salary working on several legacy Rails apps).
I've worked on a Node application with express, underscore and redis (we didn't need a full DB -- name value pairs were fine). I'm not even sure if using express is worth it. In our case it stayed completely out of our way, so I can't really complain. My only regret was using jasmine for testing. I would definitely use mocha these days. For server side, just use Node modules and ES6. No need to complicate it with transpilers, build tools, etc, etc.
Ironically, client side is much more of a hassle (I still haven't found a build tool that I think is worth using).
