Cuneiform clay tablets have a survival advantage over other materials, so it's anyone's guess when the first well-defined symbolic representation of spoken language system was invented, it may have been lost to history entirely.
Highly recommend Prof Irving Fink's talk to Royal Institution on the 3,000 year development of cuneiform, how it is read, and the story of its decipherment:
Agreed. But the balanced people are the least vocal. As Bertrand Russel noted:
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and
fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and
wiser people so full of doubts."
I am someone who moved from a programer role into management. My appeal to the balanced senior engineers is to speak up more. We don't have to swing as much as economists, enough to frustrate President Truman to say:
"Give me a one-handed Economist. All my economists
say 'on hand...', then 'but on the other..."
But we can bring more nuance into discussions - especially calling out those among us with polar positions.
I think a lot of the complexities of the type system come from the fact that types have to describe complex behavior in a static way, while still being useful (you could type everything in your code as `any`[0], but that wouldn't be very useful). JavaScript is complex, so statically describing its behaviors is also complex. At the same time, most of the complex types are types you never have to see or use, unless you're the maintainer of a complex library and you want to provide really useful types.
Highly recommend Prof Irving Fink's talk to Royal Institution on the 3,000 year development of cuneiform, how it is read, and the story of its decipherment:
https://youtu.be/PfYYraMgiBA