[iamdanfox]

It's definitely not as elegant as Scala or Haskell, but I think their justification is very reasonable. The current implementation is maximally compatible with existing usages of tagged unions (e.g. Redux actions), because it allows you to choose whatever discriminant you like ('type', 'kind', whatever). Keeping very close to JS seems to be a core tenet of TypeScript and is quite valuable in my opinion. It means they can adopt new ECMAScript syntax without clashes and also ensures that newbies have a smaller learning curve. Also, they can always add in some syntactic sugar later if they want to!

[lomnakkus]

Yeah, the key here is JS-compatibility. Unfortunately, that does mean that TypeScript is sort of a dead end in terms of how far you can go wrt. the fabulousness of your code. (Of course, once everything is statically typed you'll have a much easier time just converting everything to $OTHER_STATICALLY_TYPED_FRONTEND_LANGUAGE, perhaps Scala.js, perhaps PureScript, perhaps js_of_ocaml, perhaps even GHCJS if you're adventurous.

(Aside: I'm moderately disappointed the 'fabulousness' was not in my Chromium's spell checker dictionary. It is now.)

[invaliduser]

If by «fabulousness» you mean in terms of static typing, the language may not meet your expectations, but it seems to me it's a bit harsh to say it's a dead-end, considering it's on par with many other languages, and still improving.

Also, sorry if you meant something else, «fabulousness» is a very subjective term, not unlike «elegant» (as in «elegant code»), and because it does not have a specific and commonly shared meaning (what is fabulous to you may not by fabulous to others), it's not something I'm very comfortable discussing, although I think I have understood what you meant by it, but with a low level of certainty.