Agreed. And when you compare how TS was designed to how other languages were designed, it makes a lot of sense why TS ended up being such a great language.

Unlike virtually every other language in existence, TS was not designed from the ground up. It was designed with a very specific goal in mind: to adhere to the standards that JS developers had already converged on. So when a JS developer said if (foo), TS was built to realize that was an implicit type check against null. When a JS developer said if (obj.type === “bar”), TS read that as a way to ensure obj was in fact a bar.

It’s unlikely that a language developer working from scratch would have come up with these odd idioms, let alone prioritized their inclusion into a new language. But in the case of TS, all these idioms came from millions of lines of working code.

I think that’s why TS feels so enjoyable and easy to work with nowadays, whereas even the best of other languages feel a little clunky at times. It was developed prioritizing making real actual code idioms people wanted to do work.