> I'm always confused why people eg buy in to TypeScript, when for me the entire point of using JavaScript is its portability and ubiquity Javascript's ubiquit

> I'm always confused why people eg buy in to TypeScript, when for me the entire point of using JavaScript is its portability and ubiquity Javascript's ubiquity and portability does not change the fact that on its own, it is a pretty bad programming language. There are a plethora of reasons to choose Typescript, most prominently is the much much better development experience Typescript give you. I'm not sure if you've used Typescript, but using Typescript still gives you the portability and ubiquity of javascript because all it does is compile down to Javascript.