*Grabs morning coffee and takes deep breath*

I’ve been accused of a Luddite viewpoint by publishing this, but nothing could be further than the truth; I always advocate new technologies, but only after having balanced the benefits and the cost of implementation. It’s fair to say that other people can try what they please, but I’m fed up of seeing JavaScript’s “lack” of type safety being “solved” time and time again.

I admit that my title is off, especially given that the number of definitions of strong and weak typing is making my head hurt. “Type safety” should suffice here.

Agree on the blog post front. I also read that and had a great laugh. Also, how does he expect to compete with TypeScript if JS++ is closed source? Is it that good that he thinks other developers might — gasp — contribute to it?

“You like coercion?! Okay. Well in TS did you know that the default is to leave the typing almost exactly as it is in JS?” Well in that case, why introduce a build complexity in the first place?!

“because you are not actually using JS at scale.” Actually, I am. My point was that I just prefer to keep my JS code as light as possible. In reality this isn’t always possible, but I’ve been able to write larger frontend applications without the need for type safety.

No, our *main* backend systems are not written in JS. Rather, we have simple Node.js services that serve our frontend code and some markup. That’s it. Everything else is handled by systems written in other languages.

“And you know what the most amazing resource out there for this is right now (and has been since about 2013)? It’s called TypeScript.” Bleeuuurrrgh.

“Well yes. Why not spend a weekend with the pain monster?” I spend plenty of weekends writing JavaScript projects, big and small, and not once have I wished that I had type safety. Look, JavaScript is definitely a flawed language, but just pick up “JavaScript: The Good Parts” and get reading. It’s really not that difficult.