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TypeScript is now officially 10 years old

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Re: TypeScript is now officially 10 years old

#141

Post by jshen »

throwaway0asd wrote: post #131
xodeus wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TS catches me writing numerous bugs a day I see this sentiment a lot but I honestly can't think of any non-trivial bugs that TS has caught for me. 99% of the bugs it catches I would see 1 second later when my page hot reloads and crashes.

Exactly, you have to run the code before you realize it’s defective and even then only the defects that execute will get any attention. With TypeScript the defects yell at you before executing the code.

But at what cost? We shouldn’t assume it’s free

Re: TypeScript is now officially 10 years old

#142

Post by phi-y »

justsomeuser wrote: post #102
throwamon wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until you try a language that was supposed to have a decent type system from the beginning!

I like type systems as you can design with types and check things tie together before even running the code. This gives you very fast iteration cycles compared to CMD-R refreshing the browser/code. Some issues with TS are: - There is no hard guarantee at runtime as everything is partially/optionally typed (including your deps). - The types are not used to produce faster code at runtime (like in a compiled language).…

>> - There is no hard guarantee at runtime as everything is partially/optionally typed (including your deps).

Most typed languages don't have hard guarantees at runtime. With java, using reflection you can do all kinds of weird things at runtime. C++ has fewer guarantees because there is no VM and can't even introspect objects to see their real type. Dependencies are a real issue with TS, but many libraries are written in typescript and the type files are really robust.

>> The types are not used to produce faster code at runtime (like in a compiled language).

The V8 intepreter will actually do this at runtime. Usually it takes less than a second for v8 to optimize the javascript, and it will recognize that many functions and objects use the same interface and optimize appropriately. If you think about it the types only help so much because once you have the code graph, it becomes really easy to find the type and optimize the memory layout.

Re: TypeScript is now officially 10 years old

#143

Post by DogLover_ »

_0w8t wrote: post #137
DogLover_ wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree. Adding the types will increase the number of the characters/lines of code which with a 80-char formatter limit can make functions look almost gibberish at a glance. Do that on a whole codebase and it becomes a mess to look at.

The verbosity of TypeScript types can be attributed to poor choice of syntax and names that became obvious retrospectively. Still even with TypeScript if types makes your functions ugly, then it shows the complexity of the code. Often it also suggests sensible refactoring that without types would not be apparent.

Typscript: "function area(left: number, top: number, right: number, bottom: number): number {"

Javascript: "function area(left, top, right, bottom)"

In an editor the typescript function would likely be split into five separate lines.

"function area(

left: number,

top: number,

right: number,

bottom: number)

: number {"

None of the functions are complex but the the typescript function with the formatter creates a lot of noise.

Re: TypeScript is now officially 10 years old

#144

Post by jshen »

davnicwil wrote: post #94
xodeus wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TS catches me writing numerous bugs a day I see this sentiment a lot but I honestly can't think of any non-trivial bugs that TS has caught for me. 99% of the bugs it catches I would see 1 second later when my page hot reloads and crashes.

I find it catches a lot of design mistakes for me which I would put in the non-trivial bugs category. Many bugs that result from design mistakes are less immediate, like hard to spot edge cases (a better design makes them impossible) or code that lends itself to becoming messier and more bug prone in the future as it's changed/extended (a better design makes this less likely).

I’ve had the opposite experience with complex type systems. They make it harder to evolve out of bad designs. This is particularly true when a lot of inheritance is used.

Re: TypeScript is now officially 10 years old

#145

Post by nathias »

christophilus wrote: post #139
nathias wrote: post #122

TS on frontend feels like devs making their editor choice (VScode) a hard dependancy

What? Works fine in my editor (neovim). It also worked fine in helix when I gave it a try.

I don't mean that it doesn't work on others, but that I don't need it and people who use vscode seem to.

Re: TypeScript is now officially 10 years old

#146

Post by bottlepalm »

DogLover_ wrote: post #98

I feel like I am the only one in the world not liking typescript. It is not that I don't like types, it is what those types do to the readability of the codebase in terms of verbosity. My original programming language was Java but I switched to Node.js because I liked the simplicity of the code written in it. Nowadays every Javascript project seems worse than a Java project in terms of verbosity. My main gripe with p…

I tried to find an example to see what you mean, take this file - https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/src/vs/editor/...

The typings on the class variables are useful to have. There are also typings on the function signatures, not a huge deal.

In the method bodies there are almost no typings as all of it is already inferred. Seems pretty readable to me.

Re: TypeScript is now officially 10 years old

#147

Post by schwartzworld »

olitech wrote: post #66
krapp wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's even the future possibility of much of its type syntax being absorbed back into JavaScript: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-type-annotations ... as comments. Which superficially resemble the syntax of type hints but do nothing. Which has to be one of the worst language design decisions of all time.

I'd disagree that its a poor decision, some help is better than no help when reading code - and if it's inline then it's intrinsically meaningful. By no means is it perfect, the language doesn't enforce the type rules, but that the developer has the option is far better than not. As far as I can tell the proposal would pretty similar to Python; one can misleadingly or accidentally misuse type hints like the following…

That's fine for atomic types like string or int, but typescript goes a lot deeper than that with powerful generics. For example, I'm working on a library of functional data wrappers. This would be useless without Typescript and impossible to type without generics.

There's also no way to share and reuse types in comments. Do you copy paste comments to "type" things? What about complex objects? What happens if the comments get out of sync? How do you test them?

I used to be a typescript skeptic too, but much of that skepticism tends to come from drastically underestimating the power of the TS type system.

Re: TypeScript is now officially 10 years old

#148

Post by DogLover_ »

bottlepalm wrote: post #146
DogLover_ wrote: post #98

I feel like I am the only one in the world not liking typescript. It is not that I don't like types, it is what those types do to the readability of the codebase in terms of verbosity. My original programming language was Java but I switched to Node.js because I liked the simplicity of the code written in it. Nowadays every Javascript project seems worse than a Java project in terms of verbosity. My main gripe with p…

I tried to find an example to see what you mean, take this file - https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/src/vs/editor/... The typings on the class variables are useful to have. There are also typings on the function signatures, not a huge deal. In the method bodies there are almost no typings as all of it is already inferred. Seems pretty readable to me.

I agree that in your example it is not bad. Throughout that codebase it is clear though that they don't have a formatter that enforces a char-limit per line. It is when you combine those things it gets messy. Prettier uses a default of 80.

Looking at the code there is an awful lot of 'null's returned which I find hard to work with but that is a different topic.

Re: TypeScript is now officially 10 years old

#149

Post by DogLover_ »

dleslie wrote: post #140
DogLover_ wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree. Adding the types will increase the number of the characters/lines of code which with a 80-char formatter limit can make functions look almost gibberish at a glance. Do that on a whole codebase and it becomes a mess to look at.

Character input time is a vanishingly small concern for overall productivity. If it's a concern then you'll probably catch more bugs by slowing down to think.

Typing it is not the problem. It is reading at a glance that becomes much harder since lines oftentimes get split into multilines. I get less of an overview.

Re: TypeScript is now officially 10 years old

#150

Post by throwaway0asd »

jshen wrote: post #141
throwaway0asd wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, you have to run the code before you realize it’s defective and even then only the defects that execute will get any attention. With TypeScript the defects yell at you before executing the code.

But at what cost? We shouldn’t assume it’s free

The cost is the compile time. My personal application is about 50k loc so the compile time is about 9 seconds with TSC or 1.5 seconds with SWC.
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