I dislike CommonJS for a different reason: questionable "fs" module. This module mixes file I/O with file system accesses, which is confusing. More importantly, it does not provide line reading in a synchronous way. I sometimes work with multiple files simultaneously and need to control which file to read. It is awkward to do that with async APIs. Influenced by CommonJS, dart is similar. This ruins large text file processing. Most other languages can read a file line by line in a synchronous way.