Having avoided typescript thus far, I really appreciated this take. Thank you for sharing it!
I am pleased to hear! One of the goals of the blog post was to convince people to give a second thought for the great tool.
I Was Wrong About TypeScript
11–20 of 194 posts
Re: I Was Wrong About TypeScript
#12Last week was my first week trying out Angular2 + TypeScript. I use mostly Java & C# at my day job. I was actually a really shocked at how fast i was able to gain a working knowledge of TypeScript. The only thing i don't like is my project has extra files everywhere (.js + .ts). However there is probably a way to make my IDE hide them or something.
WebStorm does a nice job of this. It'll compile on the fly for you, and it collapses the compiled files as child files under the .ts files. So by default you'll only see source files, but can expand and see output if you really need to.
Re: I Was Wrong About TypeScript
#13Last week was my first week trying out Angular2 + TypeScript. I use mostly Java & C# at my day job. I was actually a really shocked at how fast i was able to gain a working knowledge of TypeScript. The only thing i don't like is my project has extra files everywhere (.js + .ts). However there is probably a way to make my IDE hide them or something.
I'd suggest using the --outDir option, so TS writes the .js files to a different directory which you can easily blow away.
Re: I Was Wrong About TypeScript
#14Last week was my first week trying out Angular2 + TypeScript. I use mostly Java & C# at my day job. I was actually a really shocked at how fast i was able to gain a working knowledge of TypeScript. The only thing i don't like is my project has extra files everywhere (.js + .ts). However there is probably a way to make my IDE hide them or something.
WebStorm does a nice job of this. It'll compile on the fly for you, and it collapses the compiled files as child files under the .ts files. So by default you'll only see source files, but can expand and see output if you really need to.
Thanks for the tip. I'm look into it.
Re: I Was Wrong About TypeScript
#15I prefer frameworks that focus on pure javascript because the ones that don't tend to allow you too use javascript but have sparse documentation on how to use it effectively, instead focusing on typescript. When I first tried Angular 2 their javascript "hello world" example wouldn't even work, it was some bug in their site. I already need to use all sorts of other tools and abstraction layers when building websites/a…
I don't really work in the Javascript ecosystem, so when learning Angular 2 recently, I found all the other tools to carry far more cognitive load than Typescript.
Re: I Was Wrong About TypeScript
#16I recently started learning TS after reading a previous HN post on it ( https://medium.com/@basarat/typescript-won-a4e0dfde4b08 ) and listening to the JS Jabber episode with Anders Hejlsberg himself explaining the benefits ( https://devchat.tv/js-jabber/209-jsj-typescript-with-anders-... ). These two (plus knowing that Angular 2.0 is going to be much easier with TX) totally sold me on learning it. I'm in the middle o…
Coding/language support is very comparable between WebStorm and VS Code. WebStorm is a much larger and full-featured IDE, though. Most people won't use most features, but I found that I missed one or two things in VS Code and had to go back to WebStorm.
Re: I Was Wrong About TypeScript
#17By the title I though he was going to talk more about the language but it was 95% about tooling.
Re: I Was Wrong About TypeScript
#18Ashamedly at one point I was on the anti-Angular 2 bandwagon due to Typescript, because Microsoft. When I started learning Angular 2 myself I've found I actually enjoyed working with Typescript, for many reasons. (confidence that my code wasn't a ball of mystery before it ran, using inline templates, succinctness of annotations, etc) At the same time, you're gonna need to use some preexisting libraries, and run into…
Microsoft has done some great work with languages: C# (shares a lot of DNA/people with TypeScript), F#, and now TypeScript.
Re: I Was Wrong About TypeScript
#19I prefer frameworks that focus on pure javascript because the ones that don't tend to allow you too use javascript but have sparse documentation on how to use it effectively, instead focusing on typescript. When I first tried Angular 2 their javascript "hello world" example wouldn't even work, it was some bug in their site. I already need to use all sorts of other tools and abstraction layers when building websites/a…
3rd party libraries / frameworks written with non-JavaScript languages is worth another blog post and discussion. I agree completely with you that libraries / -most- frameworks should be written in plain old JS.
The reason is simple, contributing and reading the project source code should not start by learning a programming language. It is a different scenario when a team in a company has decided to learn and write their project with TypeScript/CoffeeScript/etc. language.
About tooling, I think writing modern JavaScript (ES2015, ES2016) is beneficial and therefore, you need a tool like Babel. When you go to that path, why not use TypeScript instead and get ES2015/ES2016 + type system + great compiler?
Re: I Was Wrong About TypeScript
#20Been using typescript since its introduction. It really helped me improve my JavaScript code quality and most importantly it's really good at keeping large projects tidy and easy to comprehend.
It would be interesting to hear more about your experiences. I have been quite hesitant to use more advanced TypeScript features and stayed on a type system related annotations.