Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?

I haven’t used JS professionally so maybe I don’t know any better, but I think dynamic typing should be embraced. There are A LOT of applications where you really don’t need to worry about types. And from my experience working with app/cloud code bases in C#, I’ve seen a lot of ugly classes that I can’t touch simply because they were written 10 years ago and I don’t trust them. My guess is the web world is plagued with all sorts of old code you don’t want to touch, I don’t think TypeScript solves that with static OOP.

I think the prototype based OOP approach in JS is better because you don’t have to concern yourself with all these hierarchies. You can have multiple car object definitions with dynamic typing, it doesn’t matter because it’s all about what’s being used in the moment. In static typing we expect a single concrete definition to be extended, composited, and reused in an intricate way. That way never works because what is defined today as “just the bare minimum” mutates into something larger and now everything inherited “needs” it too. But they don’t always truly need it, they just have to satisfy some argument. And of course that “single” definition gets duplicated across the code bases anyway. Initially we think of these approaches as elegant, but it almost always rots in its own hierarchal casket.

Dynamic typing allows cleaner OOP and its approach is more honest. “I need a representation of this abstract type right now”, not that type and a whole bunch of other crap that it’s fundamentally forced into bringing along for the ride.

When I think in reality, it's just people who were forced to use TypeScript because their workplaces gave them "no choice" (always a choice folks), are expressing their pent up rage, through a sort of weird, Stockholm-syndrome projection response--"Those non-hostages have it way worse than us, they're actually beneath us: subhuman even. I'm thankful to our Typed overlords for giving us dignity, refinement, and superior codebases. All praise the ascetic self-flagellatory TS gods."

Ultimately people use TS on the back end because they want to simplify hiring and reduce context switching loss in developers mostly, and in some cases because their application is isomorphic. This choice works well when the ratio of front end to back end code is high (which is the case for most shops), since these benefits outweigh the downsides of developing services in Typescript compared to go (I wouldn't write most services in rust...).

So a universal, cross platform, cross device, responsive, accessible UI stack that has simple distribution, avoids walled gardens and has excellent performance is a "design smell"?

> Do you need SEO to work, even though Google Search torpedoed effective SEO a long time ago? Search engines disfavor websites that are extremely opaque and are made of a single page or few pages.

Nope. I develop PWAs for healthcare and other industries. I rarely, if ever care about SEO. If I did, I agree that SPA is a poor choice, but for 99% of what I develop, the web app is a replacement for a desktop or mobile application. SEO isn't relevant.

> Do you need to be able to open content in new tabs, thus increasing productivity dramatically? Many SPAs will forget the app state and be unable to navigate back to where you were if you open it in a new tab. This also means you can't bookmark them either, and I've also seen browser tab/window restoration screw over SPA state.

Deep linking has been a solved problem for so long, it honestly makes me wonder why people keep bringing this up. Use a decent router. IMHO this is much easier to do in a web app than a native mobile app.

> Do you want browser performance? Using complex JS/TS to mangle the DOM and causing redraws outside of the initial page load is a good way to scare users off when their browser shits itself for 3+ seconds.

I'm not sure how you're developing web applications, or what stack you're using, but if you're seeing 3+ second DOM mutations I can tell you that you're doing something very wrong.

Web browsers are fantastically performant, I can't think of any other rendering stack that gives you so much capability with such performance.

There's a reason why XUL, Silverlight, Flex, XAML and all the others have disappeared or have such tiny market share compared to HTML + CSS.

The web has fantastic deployment and update capabilities coupled with a powerful rendering layer. It's easy to see why it's a popular choice for application development.

Too much time is spend fighting TypeScript as opposed to writing application code.

I have a question for the language experts out there .... why is TypeScript getting so complex? Are other strongly typed languages this complex? Or does the complexity arise from trying to overlay typing on JavaScript which is an incredibly dynamic language?

And if it is the case that TypeScript's complexity keeps going up because essentially "strongly typed JavaScript" is a hack, then should we all be moving to a much simpler strongly typed language that compiles to WASM, and yet still richly interfaces with the DOM and browser APIs?

Does TypeScript just have to keep getting ever and ever more complex and detailed - is that the unavoidable future?