[pbowyer]

That was my experience too and yes, it gets better. I went from "I don't understand it" to "I hate it with a passion and want a proper typed language" to "uh okay it's caught 2 bugs I overlooked. This is useful" during my first project.

My advice: accept it's completely alien and is going to take effort to learn. I found spending a weekend sitting down and reading a theoretical guide was useful; there's good recommendations further up this page. Understand there's different levels of applying TS: one of its maintainers told me to start off slow and use `any` wherever I didn't know what to put. I pooh-poohed that because everything should be typed in a typed language but he was right. I have a few `any`s and a few `x as Type` where the code can't work it out because something's gone wrong. It works and my next project will be better.

I still have no idea (and haven't found any tutorials) on how to type form data (DTOs) or any object where stuff is structured but can be optional or required. How do you validate the type definition? What about HTTP responses which might have data in multiple structures - how do you type each of these depending on what's received? All answers welcome.

I will get there. And so will you. Onwards!

Aside: I got roundly mocked on a JavaScript framework's discord asking questions about edge cases to help me build a mental model of the language. Apparently it's "b.shit" and "questionable" and "weird way to learn the language". Well... now I know them I can infer what's going on, understand the workarounds used and why things don't translate from other languages. If that's the way you learn, embrace it. I still think JS (and TS by extension) are weird in places. Neither would be my choice of language, but I'm coming to appreciate them.