Hi John, Denise & Joao,
My 2 cents - I talk about TypeScript from a more philosophical perspective. The purpose of TypeScript (IMO) is to get rid of simple type style/common JavaScript issues that can be identified with an additional preprocessor language.
While I don't think this is the solution for JavaScript, the problem is very real. My hope is that we get a much higher artificial intelligence in our linting programs that can effectively understand what the developer is trying to do (and ask questions if it doesn't understand).
The point is, UI5 is for enterprise programs, and enterprise programs are usually not prone to misspelling a variable name, and everything being okay. UI5 programs can happily make it through to production without a red flag being notified to the basis team; and this is a real concern.
Linting is the best way we have today (which is not forcibly integrated in the deployment through WebIDE today), but I think we need more and TypeScript is one brute force solution to this.
So bring on the AI in linting that understand UI5, and introduce constants from XML views and Gateway Services that remove us from typing this.getView().byId("IncorrectId"), but that's a big project in itself, but what will be necessary to avoid developers used to heavily typed languages like ABAP making a mess of production UI5 code.
Just my 2 cents.
Cheers,
Matt