[_bxg1]

Agreed. It seems to be endemic to Flow's culture. We use it at my company and the signal/noise ratio of helpful to unhelpful errors hovers around 0.5. A handful of simple flags to relax checks in specific, extremely common cases would cut out 80% of that noise, but requests on GitHub have been shot down in the name of "soundness". Things like allowing null to be implicitly cast to a string, or assuming document.body doesn't need an undefined-check every single time you use it. TypeScript feels like it's written by JavaScript developers who want IDE hints. Flow feels like it's written by OCaml developers who loathe the very language they're adding types to, and are trying to make it something it isn't, with reckless abandon towards actual developer productivity.

This very well could be the reason Flow has been steadily losing mindshare in favor of a total TypeScript monopoly. TypeScript is great, but lack of diversity is a shame regardless.

[vicapow]

How can null be implicitly cast to a string? I wasn't able to reproduce with: https://flow.org/try/#0PTAEAEDMBsHsHcBQiDGsB2BnALqAhgFyg4BOA...

Flow has built in support for the Language Server Protocol. tsserver doesn't even support LSP. I agree ts has better IDE support but that's in part because they don't use LSP. odd they expect others to follow it when they don't.

[lhorie]

GP is saying they would like for flow to offer some leeway for things like this: https://flow.org/try/#0MYewdgzgLgBAZiEMC8MDaByBIMF0DcAUKJLNA... (i.e. not nag on a "technically-it-could-be-non-string-but-I-know-for-a-fact-that-this-is-fine")

LSP is kinda irrelevant to the argument that they feel that TS+VSCode is geared towards real-world productivity, vs the feeling that Flow prioritizes academic goals over devexp.

[_bxg1]

Correct. JavaScript is fundamentally flexible on certain things, and while it's very helpful to have some assistance with taming that wilderness, it will fundamentally never be perfect, and by fighting the language tooth and nail on things that don't matter, one only creates developer pain.

[_bxg1]

In plain JavaScript, 'foo' + null == 'foonull'. This isn't always what you want, but in the vast majority of cases if you're creating a string, it's:

1) For displaying to the user

2) Generating a CSS class or something to that effect

In both of these cases the above is quite a reasonable behavior, and will never cause a runtime exception, and very rarely even a business-logic error. But if I'm working with the result of a .find() or a maybe-property on an object type, I now have to add null checks (or at best || '' fallbacks) everywhere, muddling up my code and making it harder to follow.

[lonelappde]

Can you define an alternative to '+' that explicitly accepts null?