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Comment by shermanmccoy | Hacker News Reader

For me a big strength is Reason's intolerance of null, this has eliminated a great number of bugs for me. Reason React ultimately forces you to think about every permutation of state your component might enter, and develop logic to handle that. JS/TS will never help you with that.

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What do you mean? Typescript by default assumes non-null, and if you specify that something can be null it'll force you to check that it isn't before attempting to access it.

Note that "by default" here means "when strict mode is on, which is explicitly turned on when you run tsc --init". If you don't specify a config value for strict mode, it will be off. (At least last time I checked.)

Sure. However the any type lets the nulls in. And the any type is very convenient, perhaps even necessary to use in some situations. So then you are back to plain old js check blocks and ternaries littered everywhere. If you miss one, well, I don't need to remind anyone of the ubiquitous js console error which every js developer has burned into the back of her/his brain.

I use the no-explicit-any Typescript ESLint check and tsconfig no-implicit-any, never turn them off unless absolutely necessary, making this is a non-issue. Not that I’m not interested in Reason for other reasons though!

That's fine if you can control this configuration I suppose. But the escape hatch is there, so in my opinion TS doesn't go far enough.

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