[agos]

tsc can be configured to avoid implicit use of any ("noImplicitAny": true) and ESLint can be set up to avoid explicit use of any. Typeless JS code is also a thing of the past.

But the devil is in the details - some libraries are typed quite crappily, some have unnecessary complex types, and the code that the LLMs was trained on is probably not the best in the world

[tpm]

Can be configured, but then you get to work at a real codebase halfheartedly half-converted from javascript with half the files beginning with ts-ignore.

However crappy your Java codebase is going to be, it will still use types. And as just today Gemini hallucinated an API call that never existed (in a widely available and used library even), it's just better to have the ability to check that right away.

[agos]

the codebases I've worked at in the last ten years are not as half arsed as that - and of course from my point of view are "real" enough.

If a codebase is so unkempt the issue is not Typescript - and forgive for writing such a platitude, but you can write awful code in Java, too.

[tpm]

Yes but it will be typed awful code and the typing provides a grounding of sorts. However awful code in untyped/dynamically typed langs can be unspeakably bad. I have many years of Perl experience...