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Announcing TypeScript 1.7

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Re: Announcing TypeScript 1.7

#31

Post by dietrichepp »

haberman wrote: post #26
carterehsmith wrote: post #5

To me, this appears to be the way to go. Javascript + Typescript. Rather than deciding on weak (dynamic) typing vs strong typing, you pick both - incremental typing, as allowed by Typescript. Want to bang up a quick solution, as in MVP? Use bare-bones Javascript, it is all valid Typescript. So you get dynamic typing. And if you do not care about strong typing, you can just stop right there. But if you, some day, for…

How is this different from using Facebook Flow? I have been using Flow on a JavaScript project, along with Babel for ES6, and enjoying the experience quite a lot.

Typescript is older (2012 vs 2014), more mature and stable (v1.7 vs v0.x), has better tooling support (autocompletion in Visual Studio), is easier to install (you only need NPM), has better documentation, and is easier to Google (try searching for "flow" online!). There are also plenty of common libraries with Typescript annotations, so you can just use e.g. Phaser and Typescript together without any extra work. Other than that Flow and Typescript are fairly similar. Perhaps someone who has used Flow can explain what makes it different from Typescript.

Re: Announcing TypeScript 1.7

#32

Post by dangoor »

ebbv wrote: post #24

I remember when MicroSoft tried to make it's own superscript of JS and people said "Hey this is a bad idea. Standards are a thing for a reason and we should all stick to them." That argument was correct then and it's correct now, IMHO. Where is the objection in 2015? Is it just people are so desensitized by other companies attempts to make JS replacements (that for now compile to JS) that another one just doesn't bug…

There are quite a few differences from the old "JScript" days.

First of all: TypeScript is liberally licensed open source. JScript was totally proprietary.

Another aspect is that TypeScript is seeking to be a strict superset of JavaScript that evolves as JavaScript does (something that wasn't really happening in the JScript days) and is focused on specifically providing static types and tooling for types in JS. It's not a general "embrace, extend, extinguish" kind of thing at all, but rather a very targeted tool.

TypeScript is really one of the most JavaScript-y languages that compile to JS. Most of the compile-to-JS languages are more radical divergences from JS.

JS is not going to be replaced (though WebAssembly[1] will likely become an additional compile target), but compile-to-JS is going to continue to grow in popularity. Already, many people are compiling future-JS to present-day-JS.

The browser vendors have found that the standards evolve best when people can actually write code against the standards before the standards are hardened. Compile-to-JS tools help with that. If optional static types and type inference become very popular via TypeScript and Flow, JS itself may evolve to support those features and then we'll have that standard.

Microsoft is a better player on the web today than they have ever been before.

[1]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design

Re: Announcing TypeScript 1.7

#33

Post by dietrichepp »

devsquid wrote: post #27
yesimahuman wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been using it over at Ionic, and that's exactly what we've found as well. Types are great...but they're overhead that most apps don't need on day one. When you just want to get something up and running you can skip them. Once you dig in and really build out the application, you can add them and get a bunch of great benefits (type safety, autocompletion, "free" API documentation, etc.). On top of that, tsc is po…

You consider typing to be an over head? Do you really reuse variables within a scope to refer to different types? I feel like that would produce confusing to read and use code. IMO dynamic typing is hard to work with and slows things down. "Auto-typing" or type inference like in Swift, Kotlin, or Dart is the most amazing thing ever. It gives you the safety of static types and the "speed" of coding of dynamic types.

I think the overhead here is the programmer time spent specifying the types in a program, which is why everyone loves type inference.

This is a common communication error: when you read "typing" you think "static type system", but when the parent wrote "typing" it almost certainly meant "explicit type annotations".

Re: Announcing TypeScript 1.7

#34

Post by wtetzner »

ebbv wrote: post #24

I remember when MicroSoft tried to make it's own superscript of JS and people said "Hey this is a bad idea. Standards are a thing for a reason and we should all stick to them." That argument was correct then and it's correct now, IMHO. Where is the objection in 2015? Is it just people are so desensitized by other companies attempts to make JS replacements (that for now compile to JS) that another one just doesn't bug…

Can't you use TypeScript libraries from plain JS?

Re: Announcing TypeScript 1.7

#35

Post by devsquid »

dietrichepp wrote: post #33
devsquid wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You consider typing to be an over head? Do you really reuse variables within a scope to refer to different types? I feel like that would produce confusing to read and use code. IMO dynamic typing is hard to work with and slows things down. "Auto-typing" or type inference like in Swift, Kotlin, or Dart is the most amazing thing ever. It gives you the safety of static types and the "speed" of coding of dynamic types.

I think the overhead here is the programmer time spent specifying the types in a program, which is why everyone loves type inference. This is a common communication error: when you read "typing" you think "static type system", but when the parent wrote "typing" it almost certainly meant "explicit type annotations".

No I understand, which is why I think type inference is a much better solution than dynamic typing. I use Python and JS often and I am constantly looking up types of arguments for functions and what their return types is. JSDoc helps, but its pretty tedious. I think dynamic typing is much slower to actually code in.

Re: Announcing TypeScript 1.7

#36

Post by strmpnk »

dietrichepp wrote: post #31
haberman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this different from using Facebook Flow? I have been using Flow on a JavaScript project, along with Babel for ES6, and enjoying the experience quite a lot.

Typescript is older (2012 vs 2014), more mature and stable (v1.7 vs v0.x), has better tooling support (autocompletion in Visual Studio), is easier to install (you only need NPM), has better documentation, and is easier to Google (try searching for "flow" online!). There are also plenty of common libraries with Typescript annotations, so you can just use e.g. Phaser and Typescript together without any extra work. Othe…

Flow offers some interesting control over things like optional types (nullable) and intelligent understanding of type tests in conditionals or calls to libraries like invariant. I've had these sorts of features catch quite a few bugs in my editor before even running a single test.

Flow is also based on a daemon which continuously monitors your code. As such, it incrementally checks your modules allowing it to be extremely fast once started.

I ended up using flow since it fit with the language feature set I was using with Babel (JSX in react code being one example). Since then, I've grown to enjoy the flow based typing and the rather good support for optional and non-optional types.

Looking at the code lately seems to show some interesting stuff in the pipeline too. Taint tracking seems like a very useful one that I'd love to implement and seems like a natural extension of the code-flow based type system.

Flow could definitely use more documentation and more example code but I found the community on IRC extremely helpful and polite so perhaps it's not a bad time to start if you're willing to do a little reading on the site first: http://flowtype.org/docs/getting-started.html

Re: Announcing TypeScript 1.7

#37

Post by curveship »

haberman wrote: post #26
carterehsmith wrote: post #5

To me, this appears to be the way to go. Javascript + Typescript. Rather than deciding on weak (dynamic) typing vs strong typing, you pick both - incremental typing, as allowed by Typescript. Want to bang up a quick solution, as in MVP? Use bare-bones Javascript, it is all valid Typescript. So you get dynamic typing. And if you do not care about strong typing, you can just stop right there. But if you, some day, for…

How is this different from using Facebook Flow? I have been using Flow on a JavaScript project, along with Babel for ES6, and enjoying the experience quite a lot.

Also worth noting is that Flow is Mac and Linux only, no Windows support. We're a mixed platform shop, so that excludes Flow.

Re: Announcing TypeScript 1.7

#38

Post by imakesnowflakes »

carterehsmith wrote: post #5

To me, this appears to be the way to go. Javascript + Typescript. Rather than deciding on weak (dynamic) typing vs strong typing, you pick both - incremental typing, as allowed by Typescript. Want to bang up a quick solution, as in MVP? Use bare-bones Javascript, it is all valid Typescript. So you get dynamic typing. And if you do not care about strong typing, you can just stop right there. But if you, some day, for…

>To me, this appears to be the way to go. Javascript + Typescript.

This is exactly how I feel. Typescript is amazing, It feels simple and powerful at the same time. It appears too good to be true, and I will never write plain java script again.

Re: Announcing TypeScript 1.7

#39

Post by ryan-allen »

carterehsmith wrote: post #5

To me, this appears to be the way to go. Javascript + Typescript. Rather than deciding on weak (dynamic) typing vs strong typing, you pick both - incremental typing, as allowed by Typescript. Want to bang up a quick solution, as in MVP? Use bare-bones Javascript, it is all valid Typescript. So you get dynamic typing. And if you do not care about strong typing, you can just stop right there. But if you, some day, for…

When I bang something up, I'll use Visual Studio 2015 and Typescript from the get-go, now that I'm used to it I find it much faster due to the Intellisense on all my code, and all the browser code too (and anything else I add typings for [1]).

I find it way, way, way more productive than plain old JS development without an IDE.

[1] https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped

EDIT: I always turn off optional any types, so everything has to be type annotated, even if that means I simply cast to an explicit . I find that non trivial problems in JS become so much easier in TS due to the compiler and built-in refactoring tools. I can't think of anything negative to say about TS at all!!!

Re: Announcing TypeScript 1.7

#40

Post by yesimahuman »

devsquid wrote: post #35
dietrichepp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the overhead here is the programmer time spent specifying the types in a program, which is why everyone loves type inference. This is a common communication error: when you read "typing" you think "static type system", but when the parent wrote "typing" it almost certainly meant "explicit type annotations".

No I understand, which is why I think type inference is a much better solution than dynamic typing. I use Python and JS often and I am constantly looking up types of arguments for functions and what their return types is. JSDoc helps, but its pretty tedious. I think dynamic typing is much slower to actually code in.

Personally, I agree with you that, once you know the type system, you're more productive with it. However, TypeScript is new, and can be difficult to transition to for some people. One example is dealing with some gotcha's like adding new properties to things like window: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12709074/how-do-you-expli...
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