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Having seen now what happens when 50+ developers write a ton of TypeScript, I can conclude it’s as much of a loss as it is a win and probably not worth the complexity. Even the best and most pragmatic engineers get sucked in to solving puzzles and fighting with dependency hell.
The puzzles are insidious, because casting to any feels like defeat and the type system has enough fancy stuff in it that a solution is likely close, but exploring the wide search space is time consuming.
The dependency hell is extra bad because signatures are written by third parties and backwards incompatible type system changes are frequent.
Meanwhile, increasingly complex signatures are required to preserve the generality that dynamism affords in the absence of such signatures.
I’m pretty certain I’ve spent more time fighting with the type checker than I would have spent fighting runtime type errors.
Sure, having some schema declarations is nice, but I’d rather the be _less_ powerful, describe much looser bounds, and offer runtime validation and reflection.
