I apologise for the "weasel words". But to be fair they were in response to this relatively dismissive comment:

"Dart and any real-world usage data from it are nowhere, while StrongScript is "on" and should generate V8-based data this year."

I'm watching with interest to see how Soundscript turns out. In the meantime, Dart and its tooling has helped me be productive. And I hope you and your colleagues at TC39 are able to bring the same feeling of productivity to ES.

I'm not hugely excited about the casts required in Typescript (and I assume Soundscript) when interacting with the DOM. For example as a developer I don't find it helpful that the following is a static warning:

var input : HtmlInputElement = document.querySelector('input');

A cast fixes the warning, but is pretty verbose and ugly:

var input : HtmlInputElement = <HtmlInputElement> document.querySelector('input');

I believe this was one of the motivations behind the implicit downcasts in Dart. But I will give Soundscript a shot, and see if a sound type system helps me catch more bugs and be productive.

I also wonder how much complexity variance will bring to generics in Soundscript. I believe they are invariant in the initial doc that I saw.

Thanks for taking the time to share your views - I do honestly appreciate it. And I am very grateful that you got first class functions into JS1 - so that we've all had an ok language since the start. Definitely not accusing you of being a slacker.

> I'm still right that this took too long by 5 years at least

I think you overstate your case. But I've used enough of your valuable time already.

It also sounds like you're now happy with the outcome, the Aarhus leadership sidelined, and new people on V8 with views more similar to your own. Go for it - get optional types shipped!