I also started learning JS in the DHTML era and wrote small games and toys for IE4. I did PHP stuff for almost 10 years and it was my main programming language. But at some point I stopped doing webdev, since the whole thing was a big mess and didn't seem to get better. I hated it. After a long break I decided to do another web project again and worked with Scala in the backend and Angular and ES6 in the frontend (about 2.5yrs ago). At first it seemed to be a lot better, but we ended up with another working but unmaintainable SPA. Adding new features required a lot of knowledge and was a pain. In this project I tried and failed to implement a solid Graph Library in JS. This motivated me to look at ScalaJS and write this library part of the app in Scala. It worked very well and I was amazed by the JS interop. From this point on I develop new web-apps with Scala in the full stack and am very happy with it. I suggest to try it yourself for the frontend, since it has a very similar syntax to JS.
The type safety avoids most runtime errors and therefore painful debugging time. Compile times became a lot better recently.
The real power comes when you share your data structures and algorithms with the backend, get a type safe REST API and macro-based high performance json/binary serialization.
http://www.scala-js.org
The real power comes when you share your data structures and algorithms with the backend, get a type safe REST API and macro-based high performance json/binary serialization.