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Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?

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Re: Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?

#291

Post by rendall »

benfrl01 wrote: post #209
ericmcer wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your work, TS saves me time every day. I was saying something similar to the op 3-4 years ago but really cannot picture working without some kind of type safety in JS now.

> TS saves me time every day. Hmm, not my experience. I do TS for years now and still today I'm spending more time on fighting/pleasing TS compared to the actual code. JS with all its node_modules dependencies is a complete nightmare to get the typing right. I regularly have to change good solid code to please TS, but at the same time TS often doesn't complain when the typing is obviously wrong. I once started with A…

> I remember how awesome it felt when JS came out and we could write code without doing type juggling.

You enjoy working with dynamic typing. It more aligns with how you think and program. That's okay!

TypeScript may never be worth it, to you, and that's okay too! Not everyone likes and appreciates static typing.

If you ever do come to the datk side and think TypeScript is worth your time, it will be because that part is not a time waster but a time saver.

Re: Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?

#292

Post by madeofpalk »

9dev wrote: post #266
bestest wrote: post #227

I've been working with JavaScript for 20 years. And 5 years with TypeScript. And, well. I still am not convinced. Too much overhead for me. I really dislike typing obvious things and boilerplate. Probably my fluency with JS is to blame. I don't need to see types and autocompletion. If I really need to — I just go to the source and inspect the source code, that is how I familiarise myself with the interface. I also th…

Let's think about what happens on a team: If a single person goes and reads the source code to learn how the public API works instead of simply using the exported types, that's a wasted thirty minutes instead of two - okay, fine, whatever. If all of my engineers have to do this, suddenly each of them is spending that amount individually; and just like that, we've wasted an entire man-day, for nothing. As you declared…

I don't agree that typescript makes writing code hard. I believe the opposite- it makes writing code easier. Editor integrations are a godsend, even the minor things like auto-imports makes writing code easier.

More functionally, I also find Typescript's type refinement to help make sure I'm properly using the data and understand the state of it after I've done some checks.

Re: Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?

#293

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

apatheticonion wrote: post #290

I am quite surprised at the turn out in the comments here against adding type checking to JavaScript. In my opinion, TypeScript is not only essential in the context of any professional project, but it features one of the most ergonomic type systems I have ever worked with. There are certainly pain points with certain TypeScript features (e.g. enums) but any project that takes me longer than 5 minutes to write, I need…

> it features one of the most ergonomic type systems I have ever worked with.

This is surprising. Which other type systems have you worked with?

Re: Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?

#294

Post by KronisLV »

benfrl01 wrote: post #209
ericmcer wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your work, TS saves me time every day. I was saying something similar to the op 3-4 years ago but really cannot picture working without some kind of type safety in JS now.

> TS saves me time every day. Hmm, not my experience. I do TS for years now and still today I'm spending more time on fighting/pleasing TS compared to the actual code. JS with all its node_modules dependencies is a complete nightmare to get the typing right. I regularly have to change good solid code to please TS, but at the same time TS often doesn't complain when the typing is obviously wrong. I once started with A…

> I do TS for years now and still today I'm spending more time on fighting/pleasing TS compared to the actual code.

Admittedly, this mirrors my own experience, at least in some cases, which I shall not deny.

Was called in to help with this one particular TypeScript codebase that used React a while back, it was a mess. I suspect that some of the chosen abstractions were overengineered and overcomplicated (and perhaps underdocumented), but at the same time TypeScript made things more finicky and as a result the development velocity tended to be on the lower side of things, when compared to similar projects with JS. This was especially noticeable when new developers needed to be onboarded, though at the very least refactoring could be done with more confidence. Essentially they were not dealing with just sub-optimal code structure/architecture, not just the ever increasing complexity of React, but also how it all integrated with TypeScript on top of that.

It's a bit of a double edged sword, because when done right, TypeScript is objectively better than JS in at least some regards (refactoring for one, the type system obviously but also how well IDEs can figure out autocomplete because of it, or highlight issues that would otherwise manifest at runtime only with JS), however there is also potential for things to get much worse than your typical JS codebase, when done wrong.

This might be a silly comparison, but I'll compare it to something like PHP: when used correctly, you'll get something that lets you iterate pretty fast and just ship stuff, whereas if you go about it the wrong way you'll probably have a badly developed unreadable mess that's full of bugs or security issues, for a variety of reasons. In my experience, TypeScript codebases range from very good to very bad, whereas JS tends to be more mediocre in general, at least in regards to complexity and iteration speed. In regards to maintenance, TypeScript will win in most cases.

Use TypeScript responsibly and you'll have a decent time. Give it to someone who wants to be clever about things and you'll have lots of accidental complexity to deal with, more so than with the alternatives. Then again, personally I think that Angular did TS better than React or Vue, so this might be a niche view in of itself.

Re: Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?

#295

Post by tomxor »

CSMastermind wrote: post #116

I'm old enough to have worked on two different large enterprise applications which predated TypeScript and it was a nightmare. Personally I've found that JavaScript lends better to a functional style of coding but there are no protections in the language to enforce this and both codebases I saw had a weird mismatched set of object oriented and functional style principals. Defined classes, prototypical inheritance, mo…

> especially when you're 20 function calls down a stack trying to understand what's happening.

Yeah I hate code like that too, but it's not clear to me how type checking would help.

Re: Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?

#296

Post by madeofpalk »

mark_and_sweep wrote: post #17
genezeta wrote: post #4

I won't defend TypeScript. Mainly because I'm not interested in doing such a thing; I don't like it that much, clearly not enough to care. But even so, I will say a couple of things about your arguments. Regarding i) , no, it's not a framework. But then again, I don't think that's what your argument expresses anyway. You seem to be saying "it's yet another dependency you need to keep up with". This would be correct a…

Regarding iv), I disagree that one should not expect this to happen. There's a stage 1 ES proposal for allowing TS-like syntax in the browser: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-type-annotations So there's good reason to believe this may actually happen in the next couple of years.

Everyone (including the authors of the Type Annotations proposal) seem to be on the same page that static typing - "including TypeScript in a browser" - is not desirable and will not happen.

For the avoidance of doubt, the Type Annotations proposal is not actually static typing, but just a 'fancy comments' for the JS interpreter to completely ignore.

Re: Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?

#297

Post by bestest »

adminu wrote: post #264
bestest wrote: post #227

I've been working with JavaScript for 20 years. And 5 years with TypeScript. And, well. I still am not convinced. Too much overhead for me. I really dislike typing obvious things and boilerplate. Probably my fluency with JS is to blame. I don't need to see types and autocompletion. If I really need to — I just go to the source and inspect the source code, that is how I familiarise myself with the interface. I also th…

I think stuff like this really comes down to getting used to and accepting. I had the same views on code prettiers. I thought, aligning your code by hand makes you think about the structure. That you'd invest more time in making your code readable and thus it would be more readable. When I first got to use prettier on a team and accepted it's value, the benefits I perceived were so vast, that my arguments seemed irre…

Sure! I want prettier for types. So I don't have to manually type the obvious things. The IDEs are smart, but I haven't found one that would be that smart.

Re: Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?

#298

Post by madeofpalk »

chucklenorris wrote: post #139
incompletude wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These estimations are pure imagination. I doubt you have `any` real data to support it. Also, that is not the reason why Typescript was created, nor the reason why people adopt it, not even what Typescript really is. Today, almost every Node.js framework supports Typescript out of the box. I challenge you to provide a modern framework that doesn't provide types. And this is not an opinion, nor it is wishful thinking,…

I work with typescript everyday. I review prs, i mentor junior devs that are learning typescript. Ofcourse this is my experience, maybe yours is different, if so please tell me about it. The only thing i said is that there is an upfront cost in velocity that people are usually not considering when they are choosing to use ts over js. Sure, that cost may be amortised in fewer bugs and easier collaboration across large…

I think whatever tax you pay in writing typescript (which, as someone reasonably experienced with it, I believe is none or exceptionally minimal) you easily get back from improved efficiencies of not requiring memorizing the entire shape of your application, looking up in seperate documentation, or a run/inspect/write-code just to see what things are.

I think that typescript's type refinement is extremley useful to know whether you've covered all the cases for the types of data as it flows through your system.

Re: Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?

#299

Post by KyeRussell »

benfrl01 wrote: post #209
ericmcer wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your work, TS saves me time every day. I was saying something similar to the op 3-4 years ago but really cannot picture working without some kind of type safety in JS now.

> TS saves me time every day. Hmm, not my experience. I do TS for years now and still today I'm spending more time on fighting/pleasing TS compared to the actual code. JS with all its node_modules dependencies is a complete nightmare to get the typing right. I regularly have to change good solid code to please TS, but at the same time TS often doesn't complain when the typing is obviously wrong. I once started with A…

Sharing your experience is fine. Rebutting someone saying “this saves me time”, much less in a comment where they’re thanking someone for something they help make, is a bit ridiculous.

Re: Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?

#300

Post by marcus_cemes »

bestest wrote: post #227

I've been working with JavaScript for 20 years. And 5 years with TypeScript. And, well. I still am not convinced. Too much overhead for me. I really dislike typing obvious things and boilerplate. Probably my fluency with JS is to blame. I don't need to see types and autocompletion. If I really need to — I just go to the source and inspect the source code, that is how I familiarise myself with the interface. I also th…

I guess this comes down to personal preference. For me, this is mixing the interface with the implementation. You shouldn't need to know how something works to be able to use it, for me, that's the real overhead. Maybe this works on a small scale, but what if the source code changes?

That being said, I do like inspecting the source from time to understand it better, or make up for missing documentation. Sometimes though, with this being JS, I wish that I could unsee the things that I've seen, code that production depends upon, deep within the dependency tree.

I agree with the idea of fluency when writing without types, but for me it's not about how fast you can write code. Code for me is a lot of rereading and understanding what the hell you wrote just a few days ago, I find typed code easier to get back into and it's faster to find things that broke in parts of the codebase that you're less familiar with when you change something.

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