TypeScript tried to accurately model (and expose to language services) the actual behavior of JS with regards to null/undefined. In its early days, TypeScript got a lot of reflexive grief for attempting to make JS not JS. Had the TS team attempted to pave over null/undefined rather than modeling it with the best fidelity they could at the time, I think these criticisms would have been more on the mark.
replyReasonML / Melange / Rescript are a wholistic approach to this: The issue with stapling an option or result type into Typescript is that your colleagues and LLMs won't used it (ask me how I know).
replyhow do you know?
replyYou can enable null safety in TypeScript, seems like a pretty good fix to me.
replyWhere did we lose you? we're talking about two flavours of null, not one.
replyIts mediocre at best. Like in maths, how would i feel if addition would sometime actully be division. Thats hiw bad it is.
replyYour readme would really benefit from code snippets illustrating the library. The context it currently contains is valuable but it’s more what I’d expect at the bottom of the readme as something more like historical context for why you wrote it.
replyYup, in my TODO list (I've only recently published this package). For now you can just check the tests, or a SO answer I wrote a while ago (before I published the idea as an npm package): https://stackoverflow.com/a/78937127/544947
reply"A typed nil pointer is not a nil pointer."
replyHow would TS fix null in JS without violating its core principles of adhering to EcmaScript standards and being a superset of JS?
replyMaybe spit warnings when undefined is used? In the same way it does for when you use typeScript in a type-loose way.
replyBut yeah it's a fair point. Sometimes I think I should just write my own lang (a subset of typescript), in the same fashion that Lisette dev has done.
You can already do this with strict type checking enabled and the NonNullable type.
replyYou can't enforce it in any normal codebase because null is used extensively in the third party libraries you'll have to use for most projects.