[nick_wolf]

This article could be an unintentional case study in why letting patterns emerge beats designing them upfront. Java devs insisted on enum classes while JS devs gravitated towards plain objects tells us something about language evolution.

Makes me wonder if it was a mistake to include them at all instead of letting the community converge on patterns naturally, like we did with so many other JS patterns.

[WorldMaker]

enums and a couple others were a pre-1.0 Typescript feature when Typescript was first trying to figure out how standards following to be and also TC-39 was just "getting the band back together" to start work on what would become ES2015 (aka "ES6").

Since 1.0 Typescript has been following a plan that every feature needs to be on TC-39's standards track somewhere and since around 2.5/3.0 they've been even more strict that every feature needs to be at least Stage 3 in TC-39's standards track.

That enums still exist at all is mostly a testament to Typescript's backwards compatibility goals. A lot of 0.7-ish code will still compile today with the right flags and can be usefully upgraded by setting new flags one at a time. TS 0.7 code also won't look like modern Typescript, it's so far away now.