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

How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript developer” like me became a TypeScript fan

chiragswadia.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 400 posts

Re: How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript developer” like me became a TypeScript fan

#51

Post by ozim »

madeofpalk wrote: post #2

It'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 think moment when I really could call myself "senior developer" came when I realized annoying things I was struggling with are not stupid, it is just that I don't understand them very well.

Re: How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript developer” like me became a TypeScript fan

#52

Post by macspoofing »

I like the post, but the author's original perspectives are something I was always perplexed by. There was a period in late 2000s and early 2010s where dynamic languages were all the range (Ruby, Python, CoffeScript) and static typic was seen as archaic and slow by an entire segment of development community and I never understood it.

>I always felt that adding types to the functions/variables and satisfying the TypeScript compiler is an over-engineering and not providing any meaningful benefits.

I mean ... that is a perspective. EJB 2.0 was over-engineered for many use-cases. SOAP is an over-engineered standard for many use-cases. Static typing is not. Maybe for small scripts, static typing doesn't provide that much value (although even then I don't really buy it - why wouldn't you want to know what you're working with at any given time), but for sizable (web) applications that need to be maintained for years, it's critical.

>also it felt slow to work on, as I always used to get some compilation errors which were hard to understand initially, and I scratched my head trying to figure out the problem.

Another interesting perspective. Every single one of those compilation errors was a runtime error waiting to bite you in the butt. If you think solving compilation errors is slow, debugging and solving runtime errors is way slower. I'm glad the author learned the value of compile-time checks.

>The other reason was Advanced TypeScript concepts like Generics felt very hard to understand initially and I started feeling that I am in the Java world where every piece of code is strongly typed and overwhelming.

This right here is the big problem in a nutshell. There is nothing wrong with ignorance - we all start there. But it's one thing to be 'overwhelmed' by something when starting out, and another to being ANTI that something BECAUSE you don't understand it. The author admits he was overwhelmed by TypeScript and that caused him to be ANTI-Typescript. That is something you see in places. And that the author justified his Anti-Typescript perspective by having an ignorant view of Java to boot. The author talks about 'Java world', but does he have any experience with Java development at all?

Re: How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript developer” like me became a TypeScript fan

#53

Post by naavis »

baybal2 wrote: post #33
madeofpalk wrote: post #16

Earlier 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…

Looking at GitHub statistics, I would dare say TypeScript is pretty accepted: https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2020/4

Out of all pull requests on GitHub in Q4/2020, 18.8% were JavaScript and 6.7% were TypeScript.

For reference CoffeeScript was at 0.25%. At its peak in 2014 it was at around 1.5%, when plain JavaScript was at over 20%.

Re: How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript developer” like me became a TypeScript fan

#55

Post by jamil7 »

matsemann wrote: post #34

While 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…

Basically in the same boat, although I still use TS as it's become kind of defacto in JS land, I'm not sure that I dislike it so much as am not sure it's always worth it. Maybe I tend to approach it too much like Swift or Kotlin and get annoyed when a dependency is missing typings or the compiler is so easily tricked/lax about a lot of the actual type-saftey.

Maybe putting Typescript it into the bucket of a "better linter" is the mindset to have.

Re: How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript developer” like me became a TypeScript fan

#56

Post by mentioal »

cableshaft wrote: post #4

For me, I can handle the lack of static typing when I'm doing small scripts, like if it's going to be 100 lines or so of Python (my go-to language if I need to test some math out in a sandbox or do some file manipulation on my system). I might actually be a little faster in writing those scripts because of the lack of typing. Once it starts getting any bigger than that, though, static typing really catches and points…

SQL is not typed, it is just text sent over a network or whatever and then parsed...

Re: How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript developer” like me became a TypeScript fan

#57

Post by scrose »

ChrisLTD wrote: post #39
scrollaway wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wasn’t CoffeeScript the preferred way to write JS in Ruby on Rails for years?

I think the Rails resource generators still default to creating Coffeescript files. I could be wrong though — I switch between Rails 4,5 and 6 projects right now. I’ve been on over a dozen Rails projects at different companies and only ever worked one project that used Coffeescript in production, and that was an app built pre-2010.

Re: How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript developer” like me became a TypeScript fan

#58

Post by stupidcar »

Here's a project idea I'd really like to see: A version of Chromium, targeted at web developers, that is is modified to accept TypeScript syntax as a variant of JavaScript.

This hypothetical browser wouldn't perform type-checking, just be able to parse TS syntax and convert it to plain JS, in the same way tools like Babel do.

This would let you use TypeScript without the need for any transformation pipeline in dev. You could then separately run TypeScript in a console to get async checking. Then only when you build for production do you run everything through a compiler/bundler to get a plain JS bundle that will work in everyone's browsers.

Re: How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript developer” like me became a TypeScript fan

#59

Post by blacktriangle »

airza wrote: post #14
madeofpalk wrote: post #2

It'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".

The heuristic of "new JS tech is just needless complexity/over-engineering" is not a bad one to have in the JS ecosystem imo :)

That's my personal heuristic and why I continue to reject TS just like I avoided coffee script, flow, clojurescript, and so on.

But this article reads like "Developer who only used dynamic typing learns about static types." You could sub in any two such languages and get the same article.

Re: How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript developer” like me became a TypeScript fan

#60

Post by macspoofing »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #24

Although I like the actual language of TypeScript more than JavaScript, it still doesn't feel useful enough to justify its usage. Computers' native language is Assembly but we rarely use it and prefer to code in C/Python/whatever because this is so much easier (+ portable). Browsers' native language is JavaScript and it isn't much harder nor less powerful than TypeScript, nor does it provide a seriously different per…

The value of TypeScript is a function of the codebase size, size of team, and length of time for maintaining this codebase.

If you're an individual, putting together dinky little web sites that you don't need to maintain for years - the value of TypeScript over JavaScript isn't as pronounced.

If you have a web application that counts hundreds of thousands of lines of code, maintained by team of developers over many years - JavaScript does not cut it ... at all.

Post reply on HN