this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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I don’t understand how this would happen. If the any type truly “propagates through the system”, that means you’re passing around a variable of which you say, “I don’t know what this is. You deal with it.” How can you do any meaningful operations on it when you don’t know the type?
You write your typescript code to expect a given type but at the end of the day it's JavaScript with a type checking compiler so when "'any" gets in through a library or interface somewhere you just get a random "undefined" somewhere when you try to perform an operation with it because it's just JavaScript at the end of the day
What you’re describing is not really an ‘any’ type in the code but garbage data. No language is going to save you if you read a file expecting a character but it’s actually an int.
Think of it like Haskell's
castfrom theTypeableclass.Yes, if somebody sends random stuff, you'll have to handle a failure, or do the equivalent of returning
undefined, what is way easier than properly handling it in TS. What you do from there is up to you.No the problem is that there's literally nothing at runtime stopping JavaScript inserting any type it wants into your function that only takes an int for example