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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

#261

Post by bengalister »

Not sure if I am a Typescript fan but I would most of the time choose Typescript over Javascript most of the time for frontend or backend NodeJs development.

I used to think the same. Coming from the Java world (might explain why I like it) colleagues convinced me that it would be better to use another runtime (JVM/CLR) than trying to use types on NodeJs (it was stupid). I used Typescript in the first versions it was painful, trying to find type definitions, writing my owns, etc. So I did not insist and moved to Javascript for NodeJs.

I rediscovered the language 1 year ago and uses it for some frontend (Vue) and backend (api gateway, lambda, mongoDB/dynamoDB) Nowadays I very much like the language, union and intersection types make it very expressive and precise. Compilation (or translation) is a little slow but bearable, and it is nice to have a common language and tooling between the frontend and backend. Most of the libraries provide and maintain typescript definition files when they are not themselves written in Typescript. Sometimes I think the language goes too far in the features, I had a look at the latest versions and was a little bit puzzled by the complexity. But even for small projects to larger ones, I definitely prefer statically typed languages (with type inference and even implicit ones) especially when time is limited to write tests and have a good test coverage.

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

#262

Post by polishdude20 »

spideymans wrote: post #213
mdoms wrote: post #174

> 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 honestly find this attitude horrifying. I'm glad the author was able to move on from this, but it is utterly pervasive in some parts of our industry. As far as "engineering" goes, specifying your types is about as low-hanging, basic a step as you can t…

I did one of my internships at a financial services company. Their web applications were responsible for performing transformations on massive JSON datasets, with a huge variety of financial data. This is precisely the kind of project that would benefit most from typing. I was relieved to find out that they were smart enough to use TS, yet horrified when I looked at the code base and found that the entire codebase wa…

I have a personal project ive worked on a lot last year. There was a part in my code which at the time scared me a bit because of the complicated data organization and manipulation that was going on. When I first wrote it, I had to have a clear picture in my kind about what properties an object had and what their properties had and do on. I had to write this down all on paper.

This year, when I came back to the code. I converted everything to typescript. I made sure that every variable that my manipulation worked on had a type. It not only helped me remember how the code worked but it made it so much easier to understand it and modify it without fear of breaking things.

It's been super useful and I don't think I'll be writing any big programs in the future without it.

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

#263

Post by akiselev »

munificent wrote: post #233
mdoms wrote: post #174

> 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 honestly find this attitude horrifying. I'm glad the author was able to move on from this, but it is utterly pervasive in some parts of our industry. As far as "engineering" goes, specifying your types is about as low-hanging, basic a step as you can t…

This comment and many others in this thread seem to be missing something. I see a lot of anger here or blame on the author for deliberately choosing to not use types, but I think the author actually does a very admirable job explaining what's going on in their head: "... concepts like Generics felt very hard to understand ... every piece of code is strongly typed and overwhelming. Even simple code like below scared m…

> This comment and many others in this thread seem to be missing something.

I think they're also shoehorning their experiences. Some coders are cogs in giant tech companies that emphasize code quality, others are on teams in large business in an unrelated field, others are solo hobbyists, and still others are the only tech guys at their medium or small business. Some write code to run a business, others write code to probe the mysteries of the universe. Some write life or death firmware that'll survive for decades, others create landing or promo pages that will be deleted next month and are subject to the whims of the marketing department. Those are all vastly different contexts for a programmer and each requires its own set of trade offs vis a vis typing.

For example, I couldn't care less about strong vs weak or static vs dynamic typing at my current frontend job because the stakeholders don't know what they want, stuff changes rapidly, and there's little I can reuse from one request to the other but I was a full blown static typing crusader at my last job where I worked on a payment system that had to deal with schizophrenic regulations.

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

#264

Post by deckard1 »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #92

I had the opposite experience. I like languages with static types a lot and I used to be a fan of TypeScript. After using it for a few OSS projects and professionally, I came to the conclusion that, if I need types, I'll use a real statically typed language if I need types and JS for what doesn't matter. TypeScript works but: - it's a major pain to work with if your dependencies don't have type definitions - if anoth…

bingo.

TypeScript had absolutely no excuse to keep JavaScript, beyond the misguided idea that because so many JavaScript developers exist that it should be easy to get them to learn types.

First, they introduced a compiler. At that point, you may as well toss out JavaScript for a better language that actually has nice type syntax. TypeScript syntax is horrible. It makes JavaScript completely unreadable in many places.

Second, JavaScript developers tend to be the type that have never learned another language beyond JavaScript. They come from bootcamps and elsewhere that only teaches JavaScript and that's all these developers know. They do not have the experience necessary to not make a mess of TypeScript's structural typing system. You'll end up with incoherent ad hoc types all over the place. You still have JavaScript's ad hoc data flow all over the place, but now you have TypeScript yelling at you while trying to formalize the mess and failing badly at it.

What I find is that often when people say they like TypeScript they really mean they like VSCode.

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

#265

Post by aeturnum »

mdoms wrote: post #174

> 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 honestly find this attitude horrifying. I'm glad the author was able to move on from this, but it is utterly pervasive in some parts of our industry. As far as "engineering" goes, specifying your types is about as low-hanging, basic a step as you can t…

I think one of the sources of this kind of attitude is experience with type systems that are clumsy or slow to use. This goes equally for languages without type declarations and those with.

Personally, the two things I informally look for are:

* Does the language allow instant-to-a-human static analysis so I can see warnings when I'm passing the wrong type to a call?

* Will this language allow me to leave sections (almost always something I get off the wire) with minimal / no type information in order to come back to it later?

Typing is hugely powerful for avoiding problems. I've done a lot of work in Python, which I think has missed huge opportunities to introduce a more robust type-checking system. My current favorite is Elixir / Erlang, which I think uses pattern matching and static analysis to balance strong typing v.s. weak typing wins. It's interesting to compare Elixir to Elm. Elm has a much stronger type system, which means I almost never pass the wrong thing, but it also makes dealing with unstructured data much more frustrating.

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

#266

Post by kelnos »

munificent wrote: post #233
mdoms wrote: post #174

> 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 honestly find this attitude horrifying. I'm glad the author was able to move on from this, but it is utterly pervasive in some parts of our industry. As far as "engineering" goes, specifying your types is about as low-hanging, basic a step as you can t…

This comment and many others in this thread seem to be missing something. I see a lot of anger here or blame on the author for deliberately choosing to not use types, but I think the author actually does a very admirable job explaining what's going on in their head: "... concepts like Generics felt very hard to understand ... every piece of code is strongly typed and overwhelming. Even simple code like below scared m…

Not the parent, but I think it's possible to simultaneously believe two things:

1) It is completely understandable that, considering how easy it is to for a new programmer to get started in a dynamically-typed language (and that those languages are pushed very hard as beginner-friendly), many developers have a hard time grasping the idea of static typing and how to apply it to code, because their mental model just never included that, and changing mental models is hard for everyone.

2) It is absolutely horrifying that this is the state of new-developer education (or the lack thereof) in our industry, and I would put this on the (long) list of reasons why software in general is so unreliable.

I give the OP a lot of credit for writing about his journey, and by doing so making himself vulnerable to criticism. And it makes me really happy that he was able to not only eventually see the benefits of typing, but concretely articulate some of the benefits he found helpful[0]. That, IMO, is a sign of a solid developer who is willing to expand his skills and change his mind when given new information. But from a structural standpoint, I wish he had better mentorship when he started out and had never fallen into the "typing is bad" camp in the first place.

[0] "Making impossible states impossible" is something that I sometimes still struggle to impress upon developers with years of experience under their belts. The compiler is there to help you and catch your mistakes before you even check in the code, if you give the type system enough information to do so.

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

#267

Post by kelnos »

mmcdermott wrote: post #254
spideymans wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The author isn't claiming to have had an informed opinion of types. They're saying that they found learning about types to be difficult and stressful. That's a real problem that I think people who understand types forget. Respectfully, its really hard for me to wrap my head around this mindset. When I wrote my first line of code, almost 10 years ago, one of the very first concepts I learned was types. You know the b…

I've been thinking about this (and will probably try to put together an essay about it at some point). I think that the types you learn in programming 101 and the advanced types (the kinds of things written about in type theory books and papers) are related, but different beasts. If we drop down to the lowest level, basic-programming-types are about one thing - interpreting what is otherwise a pile of bits in memory.…

That's an excellent point. "Do we interpret these 8 bytes as a 64-bit integer or a double-precision floating point value?" is "typing", but it's hugely different from defining a typeclass that describes a monad and then implementing it for a list type.

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

#268

Post by Kinrany »

hc-taway wrote: post #214
mdoms wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is extremely unfair and rude. The TS language designer and lead developer is Anders Hejlsberg, who is also the chief architect of C# and Delphi. C# has been tremendously successful and, in my opinion, is truly wonderful as a general purpose language. In the case of Typescript the team were working under very difficult constraints - the language must maintain strict compatibility with Javascript, and the output m…

That the output is (or can be, with the right settings, anyway) very reasonable looking JS that would be easy to navigate and work on for anyone who'd been working on the same project in TS is a huge selling point. It's a nearly-instant, high-quality escape hatch if you decide you hate TypeScript, even if you're deeply into your project and have a ton of TS code already written. It's why comparisons to things like Co…

It could provide a separate but official and supported parsing library. Going back to JS would not be a problem.

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

#269

Post by spideymans »

jpgvm wrote: post #192
mdoms wrote: post #174

> 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 honestly find this attitude horrifying. I'm glad the author was able to move on from this, but it is utterly pervasive in some parts of our industry. As far as "engineering" goes, specifying your types is about as low-hanging, basic a step as you can t…

JS the language isn't great but it's JS the culture that is the real problem. There is a subset of JS codebases that are good, well engineered and written by people that understand the languages faults and limitations but the list is incredibly small and even smaller still now Joyent isn't really around anymore. If there was one ecosystem I wish I never needed to touch again it would be JS but unfortunately it's beco…

>JS the language isn't great but it's JS the culture that is the real problem.

I'm happy you bring this up. Us developers have a tendency to blame bad code on poor tooling/languages or on individual developers or organizations. Not enough attention is given to cultural factors within various ecosystems that systemically induce bad coding practices.

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

#270

Post by recursive »

tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #255
WorldMaker wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was definitely the case before ES2015. I think many of the non-JS devs that still hugely wish they could write something other than JS for the browser haven't kept up with ES2015+ nor Typescript. ES2015 is a much improved language and vanilla JS isn't painful anymore, especially with type="module" support now green enough in caniuse statistics that we can finally kill AMD and CommonJS for good in greenfield vani…

Yup. I don't find myself using classes much, but some of the other new features remove the vast number of issues you tend to face. Is scoping an issue for you? Just use arrow functions! Is callback nesting an issue for you? Just use `async/await`! I love it so much.

I use classes a fair amount, but there's still some weird stuff in the language I'd take out if I could.

Sparse arrays, all object keys are strings (or symbols), crazy coercion rules, the existence of `null`, weird float vs int rules.

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