I think static typing is a waste of time, but given that you want it, I can see why you wouldn't want to use Python. Its type-checking is more half-baked and cumbersome than other languages, even TS.
There are areas where typing is more important: public interfaces. You don't have to make every piece of your program well-typed. But signatures of your public functions / methods matter a lot, and from them types of many internal things can be inferred.
If your code has a well-typed interface, it's pleasant to work with. If interfaces of the libraries you use are well-typed, you have easier time writing your code (that interacts with them). Eventually you type more and more code you write and alter, and keep reaping the benefits.
This was the thing that started to bring me around to optional typing as well. It makes the most sense to me as a form of documentation - it's really useful to know what types are expected (and returned) by a Python function!
If that's baked into the code itself, your text editor can show inline information - which saves you from having to go and look at the documentation yourself.
I've started trying to add types to my libraries that expose a public API now. I think it's worth the extra effort just for the documentation benefit it provides.
This is what made me give it a shot in TS, but the problem is your types at interface boundaries tend to be annoyingly complex. The other problem is any project with optional types soon becomes a project with required types everywhere.
There might be more merit in widely-used public libraries, though. I don't make those.
I shouldn't have said it's a waste of time period, cause every project I work on does have static typing in two very important places: the RPC or web API (OpenAPI, gRPC, whatever it is), and the relational database. But not in the main JS or Py code. That's all I've ever needed.
I did try migrating a NodeJS backend to TS along with a teammate driving that effort. The type-checking never ended up catching any bugs, and the extra time we spent on that stuff could've gone into better testing instead. So it actually made things more dangerous.
Typescript is pretty much the gold standard, it’s amazing how much JavaScript madness you can work around just on the typechecking level.
IMHO Python should shamelessly steal as much typescript’s typing as possible. It’s tough since the Microsoft typescript team is apparently amazing at what they do so for now it’s a very fast moving target but some day…
Well the TS tooling is more painful in ways. It's not compatible with some stuff like the NodeJS profiler. Also there's some mess around modules vs "require" syntax that I don't understand fully but TS somehow plays a role.
A type checker is only going to add limited value if you don't put the effort in yourself. If everything string-like is just a string, and if data is not parsed into types that maintain invariants, then little is being constrained and there is little to "check". It becomes increasingly difficult the more sophisticated the type system is, but in some statically typed languages like Coq, clever programmers can literally prove the correctness of their program using the type system. Whereas a unit test can only prove the presence of bugs, not their absence.
I instead think that the lack of static typing is a waste of time, since without it you can have programs that waste hours of computation due to an exception that would have been prevented by a proper type system ;)
