[oorza]

Sure, but ten years ago, if I told you the concept of a "bottom type" would be common knowledge with web developers or they'd consider type algebra second nature, you'd have laughed at me. If I were to tell you they pushed a Turing complete type system into the mainstream and then abused its computational power to do things like create value types, you'd ask me where I was buying my LSD.

TS might not be the most robust type system in the world with no qualifiers. And it might not even try to be sound. And it might disappear at compile time. But none of that changes the fact that it took a bunch of concepts that only programming language dorks knew or cared about and turned them into every day utilities that the junior most developers use. And it doesn't change the fact that it is the only mainstream programming language with a fully Turing complete type system.

Give credit where it's due. I say all of this as one of the aforementioned programming language dorks who took a really long time to get on board with TS, as I thought Flow's focus on purity made it a better choice.

[dragonwriter]

> Sure, but ten years ago, if I told you the concept of a “bottom type” would be common knowledge with web developers or they’d consider type algebra second nature, you’d have laughed at me.

If you told me that was the case today with web developers generally, I’d laugh at you even harder than I would have if you made that prediction ten years ago.

[oorza]

All the web developers I've worked with in the last four years understand the concept of a bottom type, even if they've never been introduced to the formal phrase, because `never` is the explicit bottom type in TS and appears all the time. You can't go very long consuming libraries written in TS before you run into it, at which point you become familiar with it.

Similarly, a function that accepts (explicitly) `A | B | (C & D)` and then dispatches to functions that accept `A | (C&D)` vs `B` is, you guessed it, type algebra and is a common pattern in hot paths through every TS codebase.

Just because the formal nomenclature is unknown does not mean the concepts are unfamiliar.

[hu3]

> All the web developers I've worked with in the last four years understand the concept of a bottom type.

It's the opposite in my experience. Most web developers I work with (a lot because of consulting), specially the average "React sprint runner" doesn't have a clue about anything slightly above basic types and just google/chatgpt whenever things break so they can move on to the next task in the sprint.

cryptic typescript errors don't help here either.

[yencabulator]

Meanwhile what I see is that everyone seems to think the {} type in Typescript means an empty object. Just because something has expressive power doesn't mean it's good.

[bryanrasmussen]

OK, that's all well and good but I notice you still haven't told me where you're buying your LSD?