It’s hard to imagine if you weren’t in the React community at the time, but I feel like most people were pushing Flow at the time and choosing TS was quite cont

It’s hard to imagine if you weren’t in the React community at the time, but I feel like most people were pushing Flow at the time and choosing TS was quite controversial. I think it was the combination of Flow being from Facebook, and the “no build step/its just JS with annotations” thing which people made a big deal out of, but I never saw as a big differentiator. I had a hard time convincing a couple of places I worked to use TS rather than Flow for greenfield projects, but I’d tried them both out and concluded Flow just felt too unstable - the server would consume all my memory and crash and it just didn’t feel like a good dev experience. I managed to convince them by showing them how you could strip out Typescript types in much the same way as Flow if TS did turn out to be a dead end. I also recall having vigorous debates at React meetups where I was the only person in favour of TS haha. How times changed - you definitely can’t be blamed for choosing Flow at the time though as TS was the outsider. Also MS weren’t such a trusted brand for developers, people still associated them with proprietary stuff like .net/full fat Visual Studio and I think a few people had burned out in the MS ecosystem before and didn’t want to touch their stuff again!