PHP cops a lot of heat - some deserved, but mostly not - largely based on limitations of previous versions, cosmetic issues like the crummy naming and argument ordering in the stdlib, and good old fashioned out-grouping, but it has had optional graduated type safety for many, many years. Moving from PHP to Node felt like a major step backwards in the sheer number of unit tests and argument sanitisation junk I used to not need to write.

I'm so grateful for TypeScript, it's the hero JavaScript desperately needed.