Comment by kstrauser

That's fair, and I don't claim that I have the canonically correct answers. My broader claim is that I don't think I've ever heard someone say ugh, I despise that my bucket of bytes has an associated type! The real discussions weren't against types, but against various type disciplines.

For example, I find it highly annoying to have to sprinkle type annotations all over the place when the compiler isn't smart enough to figure out what I mean, in the absence of ambiguity. Like imagine this C code:

  int main() {
      int i = 23;
      auto j = i;
      printf("i = %d, j = %d\n", i, j);
  }

There wasn't a great way until recently (C23, I think?) to say "just make j whatever type it needs to be here and don't pester me with it". Contrast with Rust which is strongly, statically typed but also infers types where it can:

  fn foo1() -> i8 {
      23
  }
  
  fn foo2() -> String {
      "foo2".into()
  }
  
  fn main() {
      let f1 = foo1();
      let f2 = foo2();
      let f3 = f1 + f2;
      println!("Hello, world!");
  }

Here, that bit in "foo2" says "cast this str into whatever type you can infer it's suppose to be". Since it's going to be the return value of a function that returns a String, it must be a String, so Rust casts it to a String. Similarly, the first line of main() says f1 is an i8 because it's assigned to something that returns an i8. f2's a String for the same reason. The f3 line is an error because you can't add an i8 and a String, and Rust can figure all that out without having to annotate f1 or f2.

I love Rust's typing because it's helpful and makes strong guarantees about the program's correctness. I'm not "anti-typing" at all. I'm just not a big fan of languages that make you annotate everything everywhere. Back when such arguments were in fashion, a pre-auto C fan might reduce my whole argument to "you don't like typing, newbie!", which would make me roll my eyes and hand them a lollipop.

FWIW, I think TypeScript's pretty great. I never like JS. I tolerated it, and could use it, but didn't enjoy it at all. TS is fun, though.