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Comment by dimal | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the 100% rule. The problem with Typescript is how many teams allow “any”. They’ll say, “We’re using TypeScript! The autocomplete is great!” And on the surface, it feels safe. You get some compiler errors when you make a breaking change. But the any’s run through the codebase like holes in Swiss cheese, and you never know when you’ll hit one, until you’ve caused a bug in production. And then they try to deal with it by writing more tests. Having 100% type coverage is far more important.

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In my rather small code base I’ve been quite happy with ”unknown” instead of any. It makes me use it less because of the extra checks, and catches the occasional bug, while still having an escape hatch in cases of extensive type wrangling.

The other approach, having an absolutist view of types, can be very constraining and complex even for relatively simple domain problems. Rust for instance is imo in diminishing returns territory. Enums? Everyone loves them, uses them daily and even write their own out of joy. OTOH, it took years of debate to get GATs implemented (is it now? I haven’t checked), and not because people like and need them, but because they are a necessary technicality to do fundamental things (especially with async).

Typescript's --strict is sometimes a very different ballgame from default. I appreciate why in a brownfield you start with the default, but I don't understand how any project starts greenfield work without strict in 2025. (But also I've fought to get brownfield projects to --strict as fast as possible. Explicit `any` at least is code searchable with the most basic grep skills and gives you a TODO burndown chart for after the fastest conversion to --strict.)

Typescript's --strict still isn't technically Sound, in the functional programming sense, but that gets back to the pragmatism mentioned in the article of trying to get that 80/20 benefit of enough FP purity to reap as many benefits without insisting on the investment to get 100% purity. (Arguably why Typescript beat Flow in the marketplace.)

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