[black-alert]

I come from Assembly and C, now working in Javascript. One of the reasons I made the move to JS is dynamic typing, getting rid of that administrative pain and now being able to create stuff much faster. Even in large JS apps I hardly ever have type related bugs at all, and when I have one I fix it mostly within minutes, don't need an entirely different language and ecosystem for that.

Now the JS fanboys discovered and moved (from Coffeescript to Babel ESxx) to Typescript they apparently think that they can write beautiful and bugfree software just because of static type checking! Let them please move to C++ or whatever statically typed language and shoot themselves in the foot by making all those mistakes that have nothing to do with static type checking at all! Oh, and of course hitting the wall because they are missing their precious 'any' keyword!

I totally agree that type checking for dynamic languages should be done in the IDE, tooling. But static typing in the dynamic language world is a hype at the moment, so we'll have to go through a wave static type checking frenzy. For my work I look at horrible code bases, perfectly typed and strictly formatted by tslint..

[DCoder]

I started using TypeScript back when it was 0.8, before it even had generics. Does that make me a fanboy? I have a project with about 45k SLOC of TypeScript (using Knockout.js for presentation). There is really no way I would maintain that same project without types.

> For my work I look at horrible code bases, perfectly typed and strictly formatted by tslint.

There is no language that can stop people from producing horrible code.

[black-alert]

> There is really no way I would maintain that same project without types.

That's bold. Do you think no developer would be able to manage it without TS? In that case you must be a fanboy!

And honestly, are you not using 'any'? And do you think your app cannot crash because of a type error at runtime? And do you trust all the third party libraries you are using that they always provide you with consistent types, also during runtime? I ask this because most TS proponents live in some kind of dream.

[DCoder]

I'm sure some developers would manage such a project without TS. Good for them. I wouldn't maintain it that way because:

1. I don't have the mental capacity to keep every single function's argument/return shape in my head, or to manually check it every time I make a change. Unit tests can't deliver 100% code coverage in practice.

2. Nor do I want to perform refactorings with stone age tools like s/setFoo/setBar/g. Setting up type information lets my IDE understand which calls to .push() deal with a native Array and which ones deal with my own class, so it can rename the latter ones when I ask. I can also use tools like "Find References" and avoid false positives.

3. I'm not a one-man-band. My coworkers need to deal with this project too, and new developers need to be introduced to it from time to time, and types serve as documentation and guard rails for them much better than jsdoc or regular comments. (This also serves as a significant barrier against using anything more esoteric like Elm, because nobody around would be familiar with it. TypeScript adds just enough syntax on top of regular JS to keep JS users comfortable.)

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I do use `any` (and `unknown`), I have no doubts that an edge case can crash my app because I didn't validate something, and I never expect third-party code to work flawlessly whether it has types or not. Rejecting TS completely because "but run time loopholes" is throwing the baby out with the bathwater (or to put it in a more hyperbolic way, being an anti-vaxxer because vaccines are not 100% safe from side-effects). TS and types are an additional safety net/force multiplier†, not a silver bullet. (That said, what is a silver bullet? Because I'd sure like one.)

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† Only applies to a project that has passed its initial rapid prototyping phase. During wild prototyping rides, types can indeed slow you down. But that's really the same debate as RDBMS vs NoSQL.

[mruts]

C/C++ doesn't really have much static typing to speak of. I don't think you are realizing the power of real statically type languages, such as Haskell, OCaml, or Scala.

[queensnake]

Are you thinking of the way ints and chars (and floating-point types!) inter-convert? That is a weakness or convenience, but otherwise the typing is pretty strong.

[pjmlp]

Not much experience with C++ I suppose.