[bottlepalm]

I think it took the seemingly impossible challenge of bringing typing to a dynamic language that made typescript so powerful in the first place.

All other static languages start bottom up, simple to more complex, but end up getting boxed in by their own design. TypeScript started top down, trying to map itself on to a fully dynamic language. Never getting boxed in, just trying to 'fill' the box that is all the possibilities of JavaScript. 10 years on and TypeScript is still exciting, making significant updates and improvements.

[randomdata]

Typescript isn't particularly powerful compared to other non-mainstream languages, though, which is why the parent comment was careful to add that caveat. Which is to say that I'm not sure the idea that "all other static languages" start simple and get boxed in stands up.

You may have a point that Typescript would have been relegated to obscurity with all the others had it tried to start "top down" as a brand new language. There may be some truth that it is a necessity of a language to start simple in order to become accepted in the mainstream and that Typescript only made it because it rode on the coattails of a language that also started simple: Javascript.