https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/54163#issueco...>Hundreds of Github comments have been rehashed on this issue over and over again. Import paths are not modified during compilation, and we're not going to modify them during compilation, and it isn't because we haven't thought about it before and just need to spend another hundred comments arguing about it.
>The general tenor of discussion here is not great and I don't think this is likely to lead to any further productive discussion, so I'm just going to lock this.
I'm talking about this thing, apologies if I haven't referred to it precisely enough haha. So is it still "no idea", or is it actually "let's pretend we don't hear him, maybe he'll go away" (because you're understandably fed up with answering the same question many times)?
---
Listen, how about I just tell you why I'm asking you all those weird little questions. I still want to hear how you feel about being called a "god among mortals" for writing JavaScript for Microsoft, but I mean c'mon. You're a busy man, you just wondered "what's the ploy here" for a sec and decided it's safest not to bother answering them, right?
I understand that you, like any software engineer, like to work on impactful and meaningful things, and consequently take a measure of pride in your work; so could I, for a certain project, had I not allowed myself to be pressured into building it in TS - by people with no skin in the game, only the current majority consensus on their side ("all JS bad, but TS least bad").
Let's summarize the original post:
- Someone humiliates themselves, literally begging to be heard out.
- They bring forth a huge list of things that, beyond reasonable doubt, prove that their concern is valid.
- They are pointedly ignored, or rebuffed with some form of "I don't know what you are talking about" or "seems like a you problem".
Seeing this dynamic begin to play out in a feature request (out-of-left-field as the whole thing may be), well, that struck a fucking nerve, let me tell you. This has been my exact experience with TS (and no other programming language), when trying to address matters including, but not limited to:
- Whether to use TS at all (which I shouldn't have conceded to in the first place.)
- Whether TS can be adopted gradually (in my case it took multiple rewrites.)
- Whether I'm just imagining that I'm not gaining much by using TS (I'm not.)
- Whether I'm just imagining that I'm experiencing drawbacks from using TS (I did.)
- Whether TS is "just JS with types" (which is about as true as C++ being "just C with classes".)
- Whether the help implicitly offered, conditional on me using TS because "that's what everyone uses now", will ever materialize (which it didn't.)
- Whether I was using TS of my own free will (which is only true insofar as I rose to the challenge of accomodating others' supposed "discomfort" with good ol' JS, at my own expense.)
Every time I raised any of those questions, I was faced with gaslighting. And yes, in the end I did fall as low as begging my teammates for their help - after all, didn't I just rewrite working JS into nearly-working TS so that it would be more accessible to others?
Unrelated subsequent experiences taught me that the (former) coworkers in question might have been just as lost with TS, and even more lost with the JS ecosystem in general (whereas I feel mostly at home with it, coming from Python), but they were reluctant to take accountability and hence admit vulnerability. (Guess adding type annotations doesn't necessarily make code easier to comprehend or maintain, whether you come from a real dynamic language or a real static language, huh.) Well, whatever, that one's on them. And now it's on me to speak out against such insanity as enabled by your product.
When I see someone publicly putting themselves through the same situation (or "pretending" to - what's the difference when everyone is on so many layers of irony that it's not even funny anymore?), and it's not Clojure or Rust or Zig or Nim or Julia -- or JavaScript -- but fucking TypeScript once again; and it's not even their coworkers that they're addressing in this manner, ridiculous in its sheer desperation, but they're talking to the fucking upstream, then I'm not going to be a "good sport"; for me, this rapidly turns from "some stupid thing someone wrote on the Internet" into a matter of professional conscience.
Why did OP have to communicate in this acutely self-deprecatory manner? Is it perhaps because of a systemic issue in how the TS project handles feedback? Having personally experienced the exact same dynamic when discussing TypeScript, it seems such toxic communication has "trickled down" from upstream to us "cowering meek masses", i.e. the developers of Web-based software, i.e. the people who really should know better, because so much of what we build is intended to be directly consumed by other human beings.
For me, this is because TypeScript is not honest open source software. Say it for all to hear: am I wrong that the direction of TypeScript's development is determined by Microsoft's interests first, and the interests of the community a distant second? And is it not misleading and abusive in the slightest to have people learn "Microsoft-flavored JavaScript" instead of the real JavaScript that their browsers can execute, and pretend it's optional when practice shows it's anything but?
The stock phrase "incredibly privileged" makes me sick, but in this case you, Ryan, may truly not believe how privileged your position is in comparison to downstream developers around the entire globe. You're not the end-of-line code-monkey just trying to give the non-technicals some buttons they could click; you and your team are literally imposing your wills on a pre-existing community of fellow programmers, leveraging the unlikely synergy of Microsoft's marketing machine and the open source community's network effects.
On Monday, you will keep moving TypeScript onward; freely benefitting from the community's input on how to do what you're already doing, only better - more efficiently, more correctly. And just as freely ignoring the community's input on whether you're doing the right thing in the first place.
Meanwhile I'll still be recovering from the way your technology ended up impacting my life, no exaggeration, let's not even go there. If even 1% of TS users have been through a similar wringer as myself, that makes for how many people hobbled by your work? Calculate, and consider.
All the best.