[david422]

This is either just code that is too complicated or devs that aren't doing a good job of type hinting.

Everytime there is an any, it means that each developer reading or modifying this code has to find it out for themselves - every single time. Why not just type hint it correctly in the first place.

[danielvaughn]

I'm one of those `any` developers, and can attest to the first scenario. Had a client ask me to fix a bug in a repo that I wasn't familiar with. I spin it up, start looking through the code, and it's this massively over-engineered beast. 27K lines of Angular code to support a 2 page SPA that's basically just a note taking app.

Anyways, it's TS, and I don't know TS but I know how typing works so I can make my way around. I need to alter an interface to fix the bug, but with all the code it's very difficult to tell whether the change will break something either in the compiler or at runtime. To add on top of all that, the client needed the change to go out that day.

So guess what's going to happen? I'm using fucking `any` and I don't care.

Ultimately, this is why I don't like TS. I think it's a great idea, but if you look at all the energy that has been spent moving code over to TS from JS, and all the type definitions that were written into existing NPM packages, I have to ask myself why we don't just pursue making types native to JS? I don't want to write a secondary language that compiles to JS.

[Chyzwar]

> Anyways, it's TS, and I don't know TS but I know how typing works so I can make my way around. I need to alter an interface to fix the bug, but with all the code it's very difficult to tell whether the change will break something either in the compiler or at runtime. To add on top of all that, the client needed the change to go out that day.

It is massively easier to make change to large TS codebase. Just because you never bothered to learn TS and you rush feature at cost to maintenance, do not mean it is TS fault.

> Ultimately, this is why I don't like TS. I think it's a great idea, but if you look at all the energy that has been spent moving code over to TS from JS, and all the type definitions that were written into existing NPM packages, I have to ask myself why we don't just pursue making types native to JS? I don't want to write a secondary language that compiles to JS.

Because native types would create even more fragmentation while being less powerful than TS. JS was never intended for application development, we either embrace compilers or move away from language that have pathetic standard library, dynamic and complex type coercion rules, no stable module system, lack of strong leadership and legacy of supporting IE.