Hard disagree. For me, the proof is in the pudding. When writing regular Javascript, I need to run and debug my code often as I'm developing it to make sure all intermediate states make sense and that there's no edge cases I've missed. With Typescript I can often write code for hours without even starting it up, and when I finally do run it, it usually works correctly right out of the box.
I recently started working on a project with typescript for the first time. I have been astounded by how often my code works the first time I try it because so much is caught by the typing system. I know what I want my code to do, how it should do it, and that it does work - my errors are almost all from mistyping things.
Massive productivity boost, and I have a kind of confidence in my code that I never have had before, not having used a strongly typed language before.
The core functionality of Typescript of adding basic type hints to JS is definitely better than writing plain Javascript, but the type system feature set is way beyond it's peak and deep in diminishing returns territory. I realize that this complexity may be required to gradually convert a 'worst case' Javascript code base into 'correct' Typescript, but IMHO most new Typescript code should limit itself to a simple subset of the type system.
I've been coding C++ most of my life, and I must say, TS is starting to look more and more like C++ (which definitely isn't a good thing because it lures programmers into complexity).
It’s certainly nice that you know your code will still run when any of your values are null or undefined, and you are forced to deal with that scenario.
There are a depressingly large number of people who just don't get static typing. I think a lot of them use very basic editor setups - think Vim or Notepad++ so they don't see half of the benefits.
