[bmarkovic]

You don't refactor "a big application". You refactor bits of it (sure it might mean moving things around) and then comes your barrage of tests before you merge that into master.

That and: You don't (or at least shouldn't) write a big application anymore. The only other thing (other than horizontal scaling, that is) that microservice design makes easier is exactly code maintainance / refactoring. The practices around it have matured enough.

On the other topic: I've spent last year or so writing mostly JavaScript, and have moved to VS Code as my primary IDE. I'm pretty happy (was doing Java/Python before that, and PHP/Python before that, and some embedded stuff before that).

The truth is that a good tool (and VS Code is one hell of a tool) makes working in a dynamic language very usable. VSCode static analysis tools make my JS experience better than my previous NetBeans Java experience, all things considered.

And I'm now dabbling with TypeScript to see how that goes. I quite like the idea of "just enough typing" and I think type-hinting rather than static typing is the way forward in this networked future. It's simply that these JSON-ed distributed environment people work in now will make static typing languages frustratingly un-agile for large majority of use-cases.