I'm half with you. I think TS is only worthwhile in strict mode, as soon as an "any" creeps in all bets regarding safety are off. Same story with trusting values returned from 3rd-party libs - everything needs validation.
But you talk about code quality... Honestly if I've got a tricky task the first thing I'll do now is write the types for it, they'll keep me on the right path.
Example: Next week's job is to add analytics to a codebase (I get all the glamorous tasks - well, actually just all the tasks), and the geniuses with the spreadsheets have come up with like 100 different events to track, each with a selection of sometimes-overlapping properties.
I've done this before in plain JS and it was unpleasant. In TS once I have the types nailed down the rest is easy - and when they inevitably change their minds about something the week after next I just alter the types to match and then follow the errors until it works again.
Comments
I'm half with you. I think TS is only worthwhile in strict mode, as soon as an "any" creeps in all bets regarding safety are off. Same story with trusting values returned from 3rd-party libs - everything needs validation.
But you talk about code quality... Honestly if I've got a tricky task the first thing I'll do now is write the types for it, they'll keep me on the right path.
Example: Next week's job is to add analytics to a codebase (I get all the glamorous tasks - well, actually just all the tasks), and the geniuses with the spreadsheets have come up with like 100 different events to track, each with a selection of sometimes-overlapping properties.
I've done this before in plain JS and it was unpleasant. In TS once I have the types nailed down the rest is easy - and when they inevitably change their minds about something the week after next I just alter the types to match and then follow the errors until it works again.