[nicoburns]

Have you used TS much? In my experience idiomatic TS isn't much different to idiomatic JS and a far cry from Java style OOP code (the Angular ecosystem which was admitedly an early adopter of TS is an exception and best avoided).

[cryptica]

I used TS for several years and also don't like it. Nothing wrong with the language itself but the transpilation step adds significant complexity and is very slow so it breaks my train of thought and slows down my development iteration speed significantly. In addition to slow iteration speed, I got tired of encountering source mapping issues in some environments, version compatibility issues and TS config issues (especially when config property names change with the versions).

Also, static typing adds no value at all to programming if your project code is well structured. It's only useful for spaghetti code monoliths. If you make your code modular with good tests, you won't need type safety because your modules will be simple enough that your tests will easily catch these errors.

My view is that TypeScript encourages developers to write overly complex spaghetti code because it encourages devs to pass around active object references instead of simple primitives like strings, numbers or other primitive data types.

Alan Kay, one of the founders of OOP himself said that the point of OOP is not objects, "The big idea is messaging". Passing around complex typed instances goes completely against that. An instance is not a message. Complex instances (which have their own state and methods) are not messages; they should generally not be used for messaging between different components (I.e. as arguments or return values).

[robpalmer]

This is interesting. The things you list as problems are the same set of things we tried to solve:

- automatic compilation that is fast

- sourcemaps work

- decoupling of packages to help compatibility

- automatic tsconfig management

I wonder if you would have a different conclusion with these things taken care of.

I agree that TypeScript makes it easier to have functions with complex parameters - because they are now documented and more understandable. So yes, this demands more discipline on the API designer to keep APIs simple.