These are two very different styles of programming, and TypeScript does a fairly good job of serving both groups--it would have to, in order to be as successful as it is. There are a ton of useful JavaScript libraries out there which couldn't easily be rewritten to conform to some Java-style type system, and there are a ton of skilled Java/C#/C++ engineers out there who don't want their name on a bunch of cowboy code.

I don't think this cultural division is going to go away any time soon, so it's in our best interest to believe that people in the "other camp" (whichever camp that is) are skilled and conscientious developers. I'm sure you've heard the arguments by dynamic language lovers who talk about how restrictive/slow/painful it is to write in a static type system, and I'm sure you're as tired of that argument as I am.

At this point in time, it's a bit of a false dichotomy. It just amounts to a programming tool based on a form of meta-data. Of course people are going to have different ideas about the cost-benefit of that tooling. Of course, people are going to have differing opinions on how much of that tooling is worthwhile. Most of the problems with online discussions about this kind of tooling, come from people forgetting that it's just a discussion about tooling.

The key word is spectrum.

and plenty of people who identify with either camp.

What does it mean when people take something that's actually a spectrum, then divide that into two opposing camps? Does this sort of activity generally get public discourse closer to the truth, or farther away from it? It usually does the latter, in my experience. Hopefully, someone has set that knob to a position that works pretty well, and things work out.

those complaints have merits because so many of us will be forced to write code in a style we don't like.

Just who gets to write code in exactly the style that they like? From what I've seen, people generally make compromises, or they found the "perfect" job, or they are the one running the project, or they are going rogue and doing their own thing and introducing inconsistencies into a project's codebase.

The difference between a dichotomy and a spectrum is itself a false dichotomy. Ask any biologist what a species is, and they might stammer out some kind of weaselly definition full of hedges, and that same biologist might turn around and publish a dichotomous key which tells you how to identify a particular species according to an easy set of rules. The same goes for politics, human sexuality, and yes, type systems.

So I'm not going to hedge myself when I say that people "identify with either camp". They do. Neither is it a contradiction when I say that there's a spectrum. And when I say that there are two main kinds of people—I hope that my reader understands that I'm not a robot, and that I don't actually think that type systems are some kind of strict dichotomy.

> Just who gets to write code in exactly the style that they like?

I could point out that, again, like/dislike is a spectrum and not only a dichotomy. See above discussion.

Please re-read. I never said your programming language "brings public discourse farther away from the truth." Otherwise, please provide a quote. What I said is that some discussion about language "brings public discourse farther away from the truth."

I just re-read, and perhaps you are talking about human language. Also, no, I'm not offended. I'm just making an observation about how talking about things in a certain way can shape thought in non-beneficial ways.

Ask any biologist what a species is, and they might stammer out some kind of weaselly definition full of hedges, and that same biologist might turn around and publish a dichotomous key which tells you how to identify a particular species according to an easy set of rules. The same goes for politics, human sexuality, and yes, type systems.

When I encounter political discussions online, I sometimes have a person pattern-match something I've said, then declare all of my political beliefs for me. In those situations, false dichotomy -- or rather unawareness of the spectrum -- has distorted someone's thinking away from the truth.

I suspect this happens to Golang a lot. Basically, the Go language designers seem to be heavily into the Pareto Principle. So they are very willing to have a quite barebones level of tooling, and leave a lot of features out. This is especially true for their type system. They seem (to me) to have succeeded in getting most of the benefits of a type system while minimizing the disadvantages, while having much of the "feel" of a dynamic language, while also avoiding most of the downsides. It's a kind of pragmatic minimalism I've only encountered before in dynamic languages like Clojure, Lua, and Smalltalk.

  interface Values {
    foo: string,
    // etc...
  }

  let keys: keyOf Values

  function initialize(defaults: {[key: keys]: string}) {...}

In general, in application-facing code I think you're absolutely correct: using strings as lookups is a hack that should be discouraged. (Though sometimes it's convenient when dealing with other JS libraries).

However the feature brings some strong metaprogramming abilities that wouldn't be possible otherwise. For instance I'd have to imagine that mapped types were implemented by using those features, and the ability to define types as variants of other types (beyond ordinary generics) is something very powerful.

I'm primarily an F# user and have been begging for something like this there. The ability to define variations on record types (without and id/timestamp for inserts, with those fields otherwise; hashed/raw password fields for your various user records; etc) in a typesafe manner without a ton of repetition is a game changer.

Why? (Genuine curiosity here, not trying to be hostile or anything like that)