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

Post by pid_0 » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 6:19 PM UTC

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…

Post by ben509 » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 6:27 PM UTC

lhorie wrote: post #122

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".

Ironically, as someone who has experience w/ both fast-and-loose JS and with "properly" statically typed languages, my beef with typescript is precisely that it allows people to be fast and loose, sometimes in ways that are not super obvious. For example: type Thing = { name: string, }; function getThing(): Thing { return JSON.parse('{"error": "invalid id"}') } const thing: Thing = getThing(); // lie to me! console.l…

Post by kipple » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 6:28 PM UTC

kipple wrote: post #154

lhorie wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, as someone who has experience w/ both fast-and-loose JS and with "properly" statically typed languages, my beef with typescript is precisely that it allows people to be fast and loose, sometimes in ways that are not super obvious. For example: type Thing = { name: string, }; function getThing(): Thing { return JSON.parse('{"error": "invalid id"}') } const thing: Thing = getThing(); // lie to me! console.l…

This particular example is close to my heart: the definition files for things like JSON.parse() were written before the "unknown" type was introduced as an alternative to "any" And because this "any" is coming from an external definition file, it can't be caught by tsc's --noImplicitAny nor eslint's no-explicit-any Those two rules allow us to protect us from our own code, but not external definitions/libraries. Relev…

Post by seph-reed » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 6:32 PM UTC

gamesbrainiac wrote: post #6

I 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…

Post by smnplk » Tue, Mar 02, 2021, 6:33 PM UTC

blacktriangle wrote: post #59

airza wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.