[smt88]

It's easier to use Kotlin to make fun animations than JavaScript, because Kotlin has better autocomplete. The DOM is neither the only (nor the easiest) presentation layer when you want quick results.

> Immediately throwing them at typescript without understanding JS could lead to frustration/confusion.

I don't understand why you think this would be the case. They could write plain JavaScript in a .ts file and get better error messages. There's no downside.

It's also frustrating to constantly have to check docs for JS libs instead of using autocomplete. A good static type system makes coding much faster and require less memorization of things like parameter order or return types in libraries.