[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.