[oslac]

It's also bad because you have to, as a programmer, actually type out the types a lot (compared to say, Ocaml, Haskell or Rust), and like you say, it makes it impossible to read.

[jongjong]

Personally, I don't get much value out of TypeScript based on how I structure my code. I usually use 'any' types everywhere until my code is fully working and then, just before I open my PR, I have to painstakingly define types and replace all the 'any' references everywhere... Then whenever I get warnings while doing this, it's always related to me messing up the type definitions themselves and not related to my code. It feels like the type system is the error-prone part and my code is the reliable part... Should be the reverse; types are supposed to help me write my code but I find that it's my code (simple interfaces) which help me write my types.

Type annotation work is definitely the annoying part which slows me down and breaks my train of thought.

That said, I don't dislike TypeScript in theory as a language if used carefully. It may just be worth the annotation effort (kind of like how comments are usually worth the time they take to write). I just don't think it's worth the additional transpilation step and all the compatibility and source mapping issues that come with it.

[Shrezzing]

>I usually use 'any' types everywhere until my code is fully working and then, just before I open my PR, I have to painstakingly define types and replace all the 'any' references everywhere.... It feels like the type system is the error-prone part and my code is the reliable part

This is akin to throwing water over an oil pan fire, then being frustrated at the water for your house burning down.

You need to either use the Typescript way throughout your dev process, or not use Typescript. Both of those options are valid, but you're currently doing half of both, resulting in unnecessary frustrations.

[Simpliplant]

If you replace axe with chainsaw, you can’t expect it will perform better if you keep the same workflow of smashing the thing into the tree. To get the advantages you have to adjust your workflow, otherwise it will of course feel like an obstruction.

[ativzzz]

Whenever I've faced this problem (usually converting legacy JS to TS), it's because the original code was structured in a complex or unique way. Sometimes it's unavoidable, but for most code, refactoring it to make it simpler and easier to read also simplified the typing for the code

So maybe, TS working as intended

Also depends on your TS config probably, but TS does a pretty good job with inference, so I find that I don't need to write that many type annotations, especially when assigning variables

[JoeyJoJoJr]

I would argue that if you are writing a lot of ‘any’ types before writing types that you a very likely doing Typescript wrong. The vast majority of you code (if not 100%) should ideally be statically typed at any given moment, right from the start. This does not mean though that you need to manually specify types everywhere - you can rely heavily on type inference.