In my defense, the backend contracts change so often in early development the any just made sense at first…
Refactorings and changes are the prime reason to use TypeScript. You edit your data objects and get squigglies everywhere shit won’t work anymore. A godsend!
One job I worked at wouldn't let us do this because it created too large of a QA impact (lol). We were only allowed to modify code in the smallest section possible so that testing could be isolated and go faster.
At another job they mandated that TypeScript wasn't allowed because it "slowed down development". It was soooo laughable. The number of bugs introduced that could have been readily caught was absurd, but management never put the two pieces together.
I wouldn't say JavaScript is horrible, it's a fine little language to do general things in if you know JS well. I would say, though, that it is not a great language. Give me F# and I'm happy forever. I do not like typescript that much more than JS.
The only thing JS really has going for it is ease of execution, since any browser can run your code... though the ubiquity of Python is closing that gap.
Back when I was still doing JS stuff, switching to TS was so good for the developer experience. Yeah, there's still JS jank, and types are not validated at runtime, which was a pain in the backend (pun intended), but still I much prefer it to vanilla JS
it's a feature not a bug, still simpler than chaining 10 iterators where half of them also requires a callback parameter. Clojure even disallows nested % iteratees.
I don’t know why. Maybe the typings for it are just fucking bad. Or maybe d3 is very hard to use “correctly”, but still works most of the time even if invoked incorrectly (I doubt that). Or maybe d3 is so complex that the typings need to be complex, too, even if you don’t use the complexity (the type retured from selectAll has four type parameters, half of which are undefined by default, the other half, null).