Am I the only one that feels uncomfortable with all that usage of strings in TS’s type system? Why not use pure literals instead of string literals? This is a genuine question, I’m trying to find out what the pros and cons where in the decision making process.

I think it's kind of cool. It reminds me a bit of C++ templates, which are "compile time duck typed". The benefit is that you get lose typing constructs that are evaluated strictly and at type check time, which is kinda nutty. It means that you can lean really heavily on the compiler.

Sort of like using Python to generate Typescript, as random example - my Python code doesn't have to typecheck, but its output does, so I can do absurd shit in Python and still feel good about the output.

One example is something like this: https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/2/template-lite...

These are types that are built from string templates. Since strings are loose and can be manipulated in crazy ways like appending, we can now manipulate types in the same way. We can write types that are themselves parsers.

So idk if that's good or not, the downside in C++ is that TMP errors are fucking insane, but the upside is that I can have a function that says "pass me something and I'll call "iter" on it and I don't care what that thing is".

It also feelsy kinda more "typey". Types are just values. Types are just strings or numbers or whatever. They're things, with the constraint being that they must exist concretely (or be inferrable) when the type checker runs. No distinction between types and values seems like it's the ideal.

https://github.com/codemix/ts-sql

This project was my go-to "nifty but pointless" example for TS string literal types before this article :)