Discussion on: TypeScript is a waste of time. Change my mind.

This article has some misinformed opinions being reported as fact. I don’t mean that as an insult, I am just sad that there is no empiricism involved. Allow me to clarify:

For example, in many large companies the API that interacts with the database is almost always written in a statically typed language such as C++, C#, Java, etc.

All of those languages are weakly-typed when it comes to the MOST important aspect:

// valid C#
String myStr = null;

// invalid TypeScript 
const myStr: string = null;

Do you see how big of a problem it is that C# allows reference types to be implicitly nullable? That means that you can never know if your data is there are not. :( But with TypeScript you can have confidence in your code. The only languages that have strict null are TypeScript, Kotlin, and Swift. Can you see now how your subjective statement above is both incorrect and misleading? I feel like it’s the equivalent of “the cool kids are using C#.”

Plus, importing a function makeSureItIsAString seems like overkill just to make TypeScript support complete.

There’s no reason to write functions like makeSureItIsAString when libraries like io-ts do all of that work for you of ensuring type accuracy at compile time AND runtime. So if you’re looking to build an enterprise-grade app, io-ts or tsoa are wondeful tools to eliminate bad data from even getting through the front doors.