I re-watched the movie a few months ago, and I had a similar realization: it was quite depressing to see a depiction of NASA that is now entirely lost to us.

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.