Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 469 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?

#451

Post by FractalHQ »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #98
FractalHQ wrote: post #95

You couldn’t pay me to work with Vanilla JS on any real life project. It feels like going back to horse and buggy. The biggest things I wouldn’t be able to live without: - the self-documenting nature of Typescript code (I instantly know what a function accepts and returns by hovering over it). - the comprehensive auto complete my ide gets (saves hundreds of trips to the docs / source code per day). - the incredible p…

> on any real life project Could you elaborate on what the barometer/measuring stick for what makes a project real life? I think I know what you mean. Bigger than ____ lines of code/files I'm guessing? X number of classes/interfaces/APIs?

Sorry, “real life project” was a poor metric. I suppose I meant anything where bugs would have a negative impact on the world — either a business or individual. Realistically though, anything that I’m expected to spend more than 20 minutes working on. I’m quite the extremist when it comes to languages and highly opinionated in general.

I compulsively rewrite JS into TS and 100% of the repos I work on have “allow-js” set to false in the tsconfig. It seems to be fueled by the same “OCD” I get when designing UI, organizing css, or making music for example.

Re: Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?

#452

Post by roberttod »

DanRosenwasser wrote: post #423
roberttod wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for responding, and thanks for your work for the community! I sometimes place myself in the shoes of devs building TypeScript, especially when I am a little frustrated, and most of the time I realize that a lot of these issues are incredibly hard to solve. > i. Dependency management is indeed frustrating. TypeScript doesn't create a new major version for every more-advanced check. In cases where inference migh…

> Can I just open an issue in the TypeScript repo for this sort of thing if I have a concrete suggestion? aozgaa has already answered this one - but yes! If you have a concrete suggestion, that's fair game and we can brainstorm on the issue to think of something. We might not come up with something general enough to implement, but it's often a good seed to plant. > which in turn broke a type used from ProtobufJS. I a…

It's the original, which is being compiled on our internal protobuf definitions in a different repository and then installed post compile as an npm module.

I spent a while trying to grok the TS error but started to suspect that it didn't make a lot of sense, so I rm -rf node_modules, reinstalled, and it went away.

It would be hard to figure out what was at fault, but it's probably a combination of the node module system, protobuf, ProtobufJS and TypeScript. I do sometimes get funny type errors and restarting TypeScript makes them go away, in this case I had to go a step further.

I'll let you know if I get this again, or figure out what happened.

Re: Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?

#453

Post by roberttod »

tmpfile wrote: post #424
scubbo wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you think adding types doesn't add much value then typescript may not be for you. In my experience, types are defined once then provide a lifetime of value You have misunderstood the OP. The full paragraph is: >> I want to skip over the static typing benefits argument, because I think it is well understood that static typing is a good thing and if we could bless JavaScript with a built-in and robust typing syste…

That's fair. It appears his issue is more related to libraries with broken, undocumented types and typescript's opaque errors when an error occurs in said library. Unfortunately I think he's conflating typescript's role and a library with broken type definitions (I have no idea whether the type definitions he's had problems with are provided by the library or a community effort that may not keep pace with the officia…

> Unfortunately I think he's conflating typescript's role and a library with broken type definitions (I have no idea whether the type definitions he's had problems with are provided by the library or a community effort that may not keep pace with the official library). When the type definitions don't match the official library it can definitely cause a tremendous amount of frustration and make one doubt the usefulness of types.

I am not trying to cast blame on any part of the TypeScript system. I have tremendous respect for the TS team and the problems they have had to solve to get this far. My point is, is it actually worth it? Whether people document their libraries is part of the equation, even if it may not be a direct responsibility of the TS team.

I thought things might get better as the community matures, but I am still dealing with issues that seem to sometimes outweigh what I get from it.

And I want to be clear as well that I mean to shed light on this thought and hear people's opinions. I am still open minded, and will continue to decide whether to use JS or TS depending on many variables whenever that decision comes my way. For personal projects I am currently in the boat that I would not choose TypeScript.

Re: Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?

#454

Post by roberttod »

vlod wrote: post #427
roberttod wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree with this, and haven't been happy developing JS for some time. I don't enjoy having to deal with bundles, webpack, TypeScript, bloated dependency graphs. Luckily I can use Go for new projects, and even when picking it up at first I quickly found it more pleasurable to use than NodeJS. I don't JS on the backend if I can avoid it. On the frontend, I would still argue on balance SPA/bundling is the best o…

Although I agree with you, I'm curious how this translates to your full time job (assuming you have one)? I find most companies don't do JS any more (TS experience is a requirement)

Where I work, everything on the frontend is TypeScript, everything Nodejs is TypeScript. I did create a nice little bash utility using Standard style i.e. vanilla js in Node and that's worked out well.

Although I'm senior enough to start a new project without TS within my team, I think it would be a little egotistic. Although I am not convinced by TS benefits, most people at my company are convinced it's necessary and I don't think it's worth going against the grain. There's many more important decisions when starting a new project, and I think the architecture is much more important than whether to type or not. Besides, I now choose to use Go on anything server side, and try to shy away from the frontend because I don't find it as fun to code as I used to (partly because of things like TS, partly because the kind of work doesn't feel as engaging, and feels like busywork).

I worked at a company previously that had a large NodeJS codebase that was largely created before TypeScript was so popular. That's what I mostly have to compare against, and so I do know what it is like to do massive projects with many people without TypeScript. I don't think we ever felt the need for types, and building and pushing code was always simple and safe.

Re: Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?

#455

Post by roberttod »

lstamour wrote: post #189
roberttod wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for responding, and thanks for your work for the community! I sometimes place myself in the shoes of devs building TypeScript, especially when I am a little frustrated, and most of the time I realize that a lot of these issues are incredibly hard to solve. > i. Dependency management is indeed frustrating. TypeScript doesn't create a new major version for every more-advanced check. In cases where inference migh…

Re libraries incompatible with certain typescript versions - e.g. protobufjs fix - it’s been my experience that you want to try and only use compilers specific to each library and compile libraries separately. It’s unfortunate but the JS community often tries to run all JS for a project through the same single compiler tool chain, using one global version of the compiler instead of relying on and effectively linking…

We do generate the protobuf from a different repo which gets published on npm, and we could generate it for different versions of TS. I suppose all of this work is part of the overhead I am not so happy about using TypeScript.

Re: Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?

#457

Post by MaxArt2501 »

For me, the main problem is that TS doesn't follow semantic versioning and this leads to a fragmentation of libraries support - unless they also provide multiple type definitions (some of them actually do) - and migrating to newer versions is usually harder, because breaking changes happen so often. So I guess point i) is correct.

Let's see the others.

ii) It's true that many libraries don't have type definitions, but the most used ones have an externally-maintained corresponding @types/### package that solves the problem. And even if they don't, how is it the fault of TS? The alternative is no type documentation at all - is that better for you?

iii) Yes, error messages are something that can be improved, but then again, the alternative is no static error and eventually an even more laconic runtime error. Would that be better? At least, TS catches that there's a problem before you run the code.

iv) Compilation adds a burden to the CPU, not the developer. But anyway, it's a one-time process, and unless it takes 30 minutes it shouldn't be a problem. There are new, much faster compilers nowadays, like esbuild and SWC, plus other tooling tricks like module caching, that makes your local development almost feel like there's no compilation at all.

I won't discuss the merits of the adoption of TypeScript. Since I started using it - except for very simple projects - I always felt like I'd be way less productive without it. And I actually had the confirm recently, when I had to work on a Loopback@3 BE that somehow is in JavaScript (even though Loopback 3 does support TS).

It's been a mess. Trying to understand the models, the signature and the sense of all the entities has been a nightmare. The documentation for LB v3 is badly maintained and sometimes broken, and this adds even more difficulty. Some dev tried to add some JSDoc info here and there, but it's not nearly sufficient to understand what's going on without investing hours of study of the existing code.

This is part of the cause that prevented the team to upgrade to LB@4, so much that I even suggested to redo the BE altogether in Nest (save for the core business logic parts), rather than trying to make a sense of it.

So yeah, I'll stick to TS for the foreseeable future, and strongly suggest all the teams I'm going to work with to do the same.

Re: Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?

#459

Post by schwartzworld »

fergie wrote: post #302

I have been using TypeScript at work since 2019. Personally I am not convinced that it is worth it, broadly for the reasons you note and also because TypeScript has in practice a soft dependency on Visual Studio, and in turn other MS services such as GitHub and Axure. Adopting TypeScript can often lead to de facto vendor lock-in. There is a good argument for using types (and also a good argument for not doing so). If…

> TypeScript has in practice a soft dependency on Visual Studio

How do you figure? I've been fulltime typescript for almost 4 years now and never opened VS or Viscose once in my life.

Re: Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?

#460

Post by voidr »

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…

> 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.

What are you doing exactly? I like TS, because it's one of the easiest to use type systems.

I'm also intrigued that you used C++ and think TS is bad, C++ error messages are legendary for being hard to understand.

Post reply on HN