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I’m not into the whole optional typing thing either. I would consider that far down the “worse typesystem” end of the spectrum I mentioned, only slightly better than “types are just arbitrary labels the language doesn’t even know about”, which is maybe even worse than lean dynamic typesystems, because you might make the mistake of believing in the shadows on the wall.

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“types are just arbitrary labels the language doesn’t even know about” is ok if you're aware of the limitations. I add typedefs and other jsdocs to javascript just because it makes it easier to work with in an IDE. it's nice to hover over a variable and see what it's "supposed" to be (if all went well this object should have a .id, might have a .name, etc), sometimes even declared as two types like "this variable is either an int or a boolean". I don't really want to bother learning typescript or trying to get coworkers to do so/put it in the pipeline so it's the best I can do and it certainly makes life a bit easier.

> if all went well this object should

Why not make it easier for yourself and be able to turn that into

> The compiler will tell me when this object won't

the JavaScript language standard is sadly out of my control, and I'm stuck with it.

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