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

Remove TypeScript

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 127 posts

Re: Remove TypeScript

#71

Post by whoknowsidont »

digging wrote: post #67
serial_dev wrote: post #54

The collective meltdown, bullying, pile-on and emotional responses over a team's decision to drop a layer of tooling is strange. Yes, I get it, for most usecases, most people today prefer TS, but in the end, the team weighed their options and they made a decision they are happy with. Open source, as strange as it sounds, doesn't mean that the maintainers need to ask for the approval of everybody who read some tweets…

> The collective meltdown, bullying, pile-on and emotional responses over a team's decision to drop a layer of tooling is strange. It should seem strange - that's not what's happening. People are upset about the decision to drop a layer of tooling, yes. People are also upset about a rush job of ripping out that layer, losing information and deleting documentation. People are also upset about a total disregard of feed…

>It should seem strange - that's not what's happening.

I just went through the thread and I classified 93% of the comments as snarky, editorial, and abrasive to the maintainers. The others are just memes.

Presumptuous is a word that comes to mind.

The majority of the commenters there have never contributed anything to the project (or any other project for that matter).

Re: Remove TypeScript

#72

Post by ink »

rglover wrote: post #25

This is the correct move. A hot take I recently posted that has caused me zero issues over the past few years: [1]. [1] https://twitter.com/cheatcodetuts/status/1692256529628512667

Do you have multiple people collaborating with you? If I’m writing code that only I need to understand then yes, typescript may be overkill (though I prefer types even then), but working on any meaningful codebase without types is… challenging. Types aren’t that hard are they?

Re: Remove TypeScript

#73

Post by acdha »

com2kid wrote: post #20
Waterluvian wrote: post #3

After years of being resistant to “extra layers of complexity that slows me down” I adopted TS and now I can’t live without it. So as a fanboy, when I read things like this I try my darnedest to have empathy and try to understand it from their point of view. And I’m just really struggling to in this case. I get that it adds some complexity. But what are you actually getting without it? It’s not like types go away. Th…

> After years of being resistant to “extra layers of complexity that slows me down” I adopted TS and now I can’t live without it. TS isn't an extra layer of complexity. Walking through the entire path an object takes through a library's source code to find out what fields the object has is an extra layer of complexity. Having to rely on looking at unit tests to have some idea of what to pass to a function is an extra…

I mostly agree with the general trend of your post but TypeScript is definitely an extra layer of complexity. You no longer edit the code which your browser runs, you have another toolchain to maintain, and you need to deal with things like source maps everywhere.

Now, there’s a strong argument that this is more than balanced out by the things you mentioned. I personally agree with some of them but I do think that’s a legitimate point. I’ve seen every mitigating factor for TypeScript’s complexity fail so I’m not going to say it doesn’t happen.

Re: Remove TypeScript

#74

Post by [deleted] »

EMM_386 wrote: post #4

Remove TypeScript, change linting rules, remove Prettier, breaks all PRs ... seemingly with no discussion and merged within 2 hours of the PR. Sounds like a project I'd stay away from. With comments like "Also, TypeScript hurts to write. Good riddance." What exactly is the problem here? Do we have too many developers who grew up on JavaScript and aren't seeing the benefits of static typing? Is a tiny compiler (transp…

[deleted]

Re: Remove TypeScript

#75

Post by dahwolf »

kstrauser wrote: post #65
dahwolf wrote: post #56

Typescript is divisive. People are passionate in loving it or hating it, not to forget a silent majority that never even tried it. Typescript is totalitarian. It consumes you whole. It makes no sense to partially adapt it as its supposed benefits will then never materialize. The deeper you're in, the more motivated you'll get to go even deeper. This is entirely opposite from writing unit tests. Everybody hates to do…

> He craves the simpler times we once knew, where web/front-end development wasn't such a hot mess. I strongly disagree. Web/front-end development was always a hot mess. It's just that when we were using Perl to write CGI.pm pages, we didn't have good tooling to tell us all the terrible things we were doing. Modern tooling just shines a light on our mistakes. It didn't make them for us. Those simpler times only exist…

I was looking at the bigger picture, and didn't clarify that point enough.

What I mean to say is that web development was more accessible during simpler times. People from all walks of life would develop websites, flash stuff, and even dynamic sites, i.e. LAMP. They could do that because it was simple enough to learn.

Front-end development as we typically do it today has turned into a hardcore engineering discipline of staggering complexity.

It is in fact so engineering-heavy that even within the world of professional front-end development it has caused a split where there's a "front of the front-end" (CSS, UX, accessibility) and a "back of the front-end" (the engineering part).

You may be able to justify every single tool, command line, pattern or best practice and it's not my point to talk you out of it. My point is to zoom out and consider this larger pattern.

Re: Remove TypeScript

#76

Post by ink »

serial_dev wrote: post #54

The collective meltdown, bullying, pile-on and emotional responses over a team's decision to drop a layer of tooling is strange. Yes, I get it, for most usecases, most people today prefer TS, but in the end, the team weighed their options and they made a decision they are happy with. Open source, as strange as it sounds, doesn't mean that the maintainers need to ask for the approval of everybody who read some tweets…

I think dropping Typescript the way they did was silly, but you are absolutely correct that they should be able to do so, even if it’s unpopular.

Re: Remove TypeScript

#77

Post by gardenhedge »

digging wrote: post #64
gardenhedge wrote: post #47

I often find that types in typescript are bolted on and the whole thing gets pretty messy. I like typed languages like Java where the type system is more built into the language. Typescript errors are also very annoying to read. This is TS code - and I think it's crazy. type DeepPartial = { [P in keyof T]?: T[P] extends (infer U)[] ? DeepPartial [] : T[P] extends ReadonlyArray ? ReadonlyArray > : T[P] extends object…

Yes that's valid TypeScript, but is it good TypeScript? One should take a ternary nested that deep as a sign that refactoring is needed. You can write terrible code in any language, that doesn't make the language problematic.

Agreed that terrible code can show up in any language. For some reason, I notice it more with TS. Here's a random example too (not saying this is terrible, just confusing to me):

https://github.com/prisma/prisma/blob/main/helpers/blaze/uti...

Re: Remove TypeScript

#78

Post by kstrauser »

dahwolf wrote: post #75
kstrauser wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He craves the simpler times we once knew, where web/front-end development wasn't such a hot mess. I strongly disagree. Web/front-end development was always a hot mess. It's just that when we were using Perl to write CGI.pm pages, we didn't have good tooling to tell us all the terrible things we were doing. Modern tooling just shines a light on our mistakes. It didn't make them for us. Those simpler times only exist…

I was looking at the bigger picture, and didn't clarify that point enough. What I mean to say is that web development was more accessible during simpler times. People from all walks of life would develop websites, flash stuff, and even dynamic sites, i.e. LAMP. They could do that because it was simple enough to learn. Front-end development as we typically do it today has turned into a hardcore engineering discipline…

Those are very fair points! You use to be able to write a credible site with a text editor and an FTP client, but that's a long time gone.

(Bystanders, don't "correct" me with "technically you still can...", etc. I know. It's all just text, right? But the parent poster is absolutely right about the general state of things.)

Re: Remove TypeScript

#79

Post by acdha »

gardenhedge wrote: post #47

I often find that types in typescript are bolted on and the whole thing gets pretty messy. I like typed languages like Java where the type system is more built into the language. Typescript errors are also very annoying to read. This is TS code - and I think it's crazy. type DeepPartial = { [P in keyof T]?: T[P] extends (infer U)[] ? DeepPartial [] : T[P] extends ReadonlyArray ? ReadonlyArray > : T[P] extends object…

That’s not good TypeScript but I’ll note that I’ve seen a ton of nasty Java where everything is declared as taking “object”, and they’re abusing ternary operators just as badly (I remember this dude who had an allergy to if statements even if his ternararies wrapped into more lines), and lots of errors caught & ignored to avoid the “inconvenience” of handling them.

This doesn’t mean that Java is a bad language, only that it can be used badly.

Re: Remove TypeScript

#80

Post by aranw »

mplewis wrote: post #44
EMM_386 wrote: post #4

Remove TypeScript, change linting rules, remove Prettier, breaks all PRs ... seemingly with no discussion and merged within 2 hours of the PR. Sounds like a project I'd stay away from. With comments like "Also, TypeScript hurts to write. Good riddance." What exactly is the problem here? Do we have too many developers who grew up on JavaScript and aren't seeing the benefits of static typing? Is a tiny compiler (transp…

I've had to deal with a couple other unilateral decisions that DHH drove into the Rails ecosystem (e.g. getting rid of Webpacker) and I think that staying away from his projects is a good idea.

I just can’t imagine an organisation taking a project that has DHH part of it seriously. You’d never know whether something you’ve vested engineering time into might just all of sudden just do a huge 180 and decide the tool your using should completely change
Post reply on HN