I once worked at a company where there was an ongoing rivalry among the developers between Java and Javascript/NodeJS.
To be honest, I didn’t know enough back in those days to have anything remotely resembling an informed opinion. I’m not sure that much has changed there, but one of the things that surprised me a bit was the way that one of the Java proponents would dismiss Typescript as just being a way to try and make Javascript more like Java.
I ended up ultimately choosing to focus my learning efforts more an Javascript/NodeJS simply because I liked the idea of not having to master Java for the back end and Javascript for the front end, but I always figured that someone who was in favor of strong typing would be in favor of bringing stronger typing to Javascript.
I’ve now been working with Typescript for a few months. There is still obviously a ton that I need to get my arms around with Typescript, but my initial impression has largely been favorable for all of the reasons that people typically praise it for.
I do occasionally miss being able to do crazy things with my variables, but by and large those types of things are likely to end up bitting me at a future point. By giving that up, I get instant feedback from my code editor when I mis-remember the type of a variable and try to use it in a way that is going to get me in trouble the first time I do a test run of my new code.
Getting things setup with some of the packages I was previously using on my side project proved to be beyond by current abilities, but once the setup is done, I seem to be developing at a faster rate simply because I’m chasing down fewer typing errors.
Typescript doesn’t magically make NodeJS something it isn’t. You still have to worry about blocking the event loop, but all in all (for what it’s worth), I think it’s a helpful extension to the base language.