Why not? If they can cut costs by reducing specs that don’t matter to their target audience, that just seems like sound engineering.

No question, this is what the moneymen want. They see programmers (all human employees, really) as a liability.

Then the second part of my statement applies.

Not to short-circuit the joke, but in this case, it’s because the valid JavaScript version is…

let a

…and one of TypeScript’s main design goals is to be a superset of JavaScript, that only adds syntax, and doesn’t re-write it.

Beyond that, it’s probably a case of some new language just using what the designer is familiar with.