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by dfee 2173 days ago
What’s confusing? I must’ve missed it in my cursory scan.
2 comments

Dog and Person are structurally the same so you can assign a person to a dog and vice versa. But that's just how structural typing works and as a user of TypeScript I haven't run into a case where this'd be an issue.
Haha oh. Yeah, assumed that the Dog definition wasn’t worthless. Indeed TS is structurally typed. And that’s nice!
I worked on a web based editor. A library would give us a range to highlight, in 1-based coordinates. The editor control was 0-based. As you can imagine it was easy to forget to translate back and forth in one path or another. In a strongly typed language I would simply define two Range types and the compiler would eliminate the mistake. I assumed Typescript could help me in the same way but it allowed the two types to be interchanged silently because they had the same structure. Perhaps I was holding it wrong?
Typescript has two hacks that help with mixing of similar data and introduce somewhat-nominal typing - branding and flavoring [1]. Also see smart constructors [2] for more functional approach.

[1] https://gist.github.com/dcolthorp/aa21cf87d847ae9942106435bf...

[2] https://dev.to/gcanti/functional-design-smart-constructors-1...

That's the most they could simplify the code to make the point?
A person value assigned to a dog variable