Here's an alternative to TypeScript that people who dislike type complexity but want better tooling, might find interesting: https://github.com/keyboardDrummer/typeless
Disclaimer: I'm the author
How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript developer” like me became a TypeScript fan
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Re: How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript developer” like me became a TypeScript fan
#42Don't want to oversimplify since the article has some useful insights, but overall it reads like a typical transition from thinking static typing is a burden to realizing type safety can be incredibly useful. I distinctly remember that in college I believed the history of programming languages is purely evolutionary in the sense that newer languages are objectively better than older ones. As in - people wrote assembl…
Of the languages you listed, Java is the new kid on the block. Python is older than Java.
Re: How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript developer” like me became a TypeScript fan
#43I just can't bring myself to use curly bracket languages. I can't make a good enough case for any of them. I read way too much code to make myself read code that's not beautiful.
what are alternatives?
python's tabs?
Re: How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript developer” like me became a TypeScript fan
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess static first is a chore because at that point you have no idea what invariant or structure is required for the task. After prototyping you know where to tighten the bolts.
There are some languages that give you a bit of both worlds, like F#.
hey, the ml family is only 40+ years old, maybe in 50 years they'll be mainstream
Re: How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript developer” like me became a TypeScript fan
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typescript is hardly "new", it's fairly widely accepted now. It might be worth thinking "why do all these people enjoy using Typescript?". or idk just say that no, its the kids that are wrong.
Typescript is not accepted. How AngularJS stuck on 1.* is the best proof, and an illustration for the problem. Pretty serious people are working in Angular community, it's immensely popular in the enterprise webapp space, so I will not take the "Ah, it's just amateurs who are stuck there." It adds to countless attempts of other transpiled *scripts to extend Javascript. They, and Coffeescript in particular, are good h…
About 95% of React components I see in the wild are in TypeScript. The most rapidly growing JS backend framework (Nest) is in TS. Deno, the evolution of Node, is based on TS. Pretty much everything in the JavaScript OSS world has TS options or is based on TS.
I doubt Coffeescript ever saw this scale of adoption.
Re: How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript developer” like me became a TypeScript fan
#46I think a large part of the support for Typescript comes from being able to create good tools for the language. But, I still have an aversion to front-end development itself, because it just feels too _involved_. You have to set up so much, and it has become a lot more difficult since you need to install webpack, postcss, and many other plugins just to do a hello world app. It's still bearable if you have to do all o…
> You have to set up so much
I think tooling has mostly addressed this, or at least provided a mostly braindead path for 90% of needs. For example, npx create-react-app $YOURAPPNAME sets up practically everything you need to get a reasonable react app going, at least in terms of the transpiler/set of plugins. It makes very few choices re: actual react libs though (no preferred router, flux, etc). The preact equivalents are somewhat more opinionated, and go a bit farther in setting up routing/splitting nicely for you.
> This makes me feel very insecure about my code.
I get this. While I stand by what I mentioned above, it also makes me nervous that I understand so little of my setup given how much of it was setup automatically for me, which makes me trust the environment less. FWIW, outside of web dev it seems like _most_ people have no idea how their setup works re: compiling a project. How many devs for say postgres understand the make file or configure scripts? Probably not that many. Maybe that's getting better with newer tools like cargo, but web dev always seemed like the exception wrt understanding the bundling environment, and we're just now catching up to the level of complexity that other types of dev have had for decades.
Edit: apparently that was a bad example. Postgres's make file is very simple: https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/Makefile
The configure script is less so: https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/configure
Re: How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript developer” like me became a TypeScript fan
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, Coffeescript was fairly widely used at its peak, and now it's all but dead. Front-end fads are fickle. At least TypeScript has Microsoft backing it so they'll likely continue to support even if the rest of the webdev world moves on to the next shiny object.
I don't think I've ever heard of any in-production, large apps in Coffeescript, even from when it was at its peak. I know of a handful of companies that tried it and even enjoyed it quite a bit but none of it was for mass consumption. Typescript, meanwhile, is used for hugely popular apps, is used by very large companies, has Microsoft's full backing, etc. The two are not comparable. Edit: Clearly I'm misremembering…
A significant portion of Airbnb was written in Coffeescript, including most of the complex app-like stuff used by hosts to manage listings and calendars.
We ported off of Coffeescript when ES6 and Babel came out, and you could start writing `class` and using `() => {...}` function expressions with lexical `this` scoping.
Coffeescript lost because it stood still next to the ecosystem and next to the new Ecmascript language standards, which obliviated its advantages. The only advantage Coffeescript had over ES6 was “some of your code is already written in it”.
Once Ecmascript formalizes a type system, we’ll see the same process happen with Typescript. But, I think it will be many years before that sort of feature is standardized. In the mean time, I’m happy to use Typescript today.
Re: How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript developer” like me became a TypeScript fan
#48It's probably worth taking a step back and interrogating why the actual "Why was I Anti-TypeScript?" a little bit more and use it as an opportunity for broader self development. The author didn't use and understand something, and rather than trying to they instead just defaulted to rejection. It's midly disapointing seeing this in people who label themselves as "Senior".
I find your interpretation and subsequent extrapolation on his qualification as senior unfair. He clearly tried TS and was frustrated by his initial experience, because there were certain things he had a hard time understanding or justifying. There's no opportunity for broader self development here. I try stuff out and I scratch my head, should I risk sticking with it or should I move on. It's a gamble. Others have made the alternative bet with a different tech du jour and lost. So your results may vary.
Re: How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript developer” like me became a TypeScript fan
#49While I'm fan of statically typing, there is something with Typescript I don't like, but don't know exactly what it is. In my day-to-day it's mostly Kotlin and Elm, which also are both statically typed, which I don't mind and mostly don't even notice. But with Typescript it is as if I'm always fighting the compilator, trying to make it happy with whatever code I wrote. Maybe it's just the JS ecosystem being too lax t…
> Like you have a react hook and some components that you can compose, and the typedefs just become unwieldy and impossible to get right. Often they end up not even catching what should be compilation errors.
I’m curious - how do Elm and Kotlin solve these problems in a way that balances the often competing goals of “add types to reduce errors” vs “have a high productivity environment where it’s quick and easy for engineers to write new code”?
Re: How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript developer” like me became a TypeScript fan
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typescript is hardly "new", it's fairly widely accepted now. It might be worth thinking "why do all these people enjoy using Typescript?". or idk just say that no, its the kids that are wrong.
I mean, Coffeescript was fairly widely used at its peak, and now it's all but dead. Front-end fads are fickle. At least TypeScript has Microsoft backing it so they'll likely continue to support even if the rest of the webdev world moves on to the next shiny object.
Coffeescript was a good thing when we only had ES5. In fact many of the things it championed made it into ES6 and beyond. I think with TypeScript it isn't just a shiny thing. If it does substantially change I believe it will be to break the forced compat with JS. As WebAssembly gets more adopted it will be possible to not have JS targets, and thus remove a lot of the weird JS things that have been kept for compatibility. Typescript has the gravity to continue.