Was using JS for about 6 yrs now and decided will start using TS for a new Node.js project. Admitted it has its warts ... hit my first bottleneck rightaway when parsing the request query param. TS Express bindings declare it as string | string[] | ParsedQs | ParsedQs[]. Ok extract it 'as' string and move on. But I find as I am using it more and more it is getting better (or I am getting more disciplined!) .. maybe I am reading this wrong re the long compile time reported, could the code not be broken into modules so the compile is more isolated ??
Deno will stop using TypeScript
21–30 of 359 posts
Re: Deno will stop using TypeScript
#22This is gonna be an unpopular opinion but as someone who learned to program in loosely typed languages, I have never seen the TS appeal. TS feels like something that was created to lure programmers who couldn’t wrap their heads around JS loose nature. Almost like it was created to convince Java and C# developers to use JS. It have never felt about it like something that would make my code better or more organized. It…
You don't have to write as many tests when you use static typing, because your method contracts are solid.
You can refactor your entire codebase with a few operations and don't have to worry about anything breaking.
Is your timestamp in seconds? Millis? Is it a duration? Does it have a time zone?
Have you ever written a method that returns more than one type of thing? Or had polymorphic inputs?
Where are your dynamically dispatched calls even used, and how do you know you modified them all?
One of the most common operations in building new features is plumbing new state through the system. Types are there to help you in such perilous times.
Types are refreshing and reassuring.
Re: Deno will stop using TypeScript
#23Why such a large, important project would want to drop static types is beyond me. > TypeScript isn’t proving itself helpful to organize Deno code. On the contrary, the Deno team is experiencing the opposite effect. One of the issues mentioned is that they ended up with duplicate independent Body classes in two locations This feels like process immaturity or unfamiliarity. Thousands of other projects manage to do just…
Most of the project is and will still be written in Rust, a statically typed language, so saying that the "project" will drop static types is an overstatement. Based on the design document where the devs talk about this, the TS code in question is about 10k lines of glue code between Rust & userland JS/TS.
Re: Deno will stop using TypeScript
#24This is gonna be an unpopular opinion but as someone who learned to program in loosely typed languages, I have never seen the TS appeal. TS feels like something that was created to lure programmers who couldn’t wrap their heads around JS loose nature. Almost like it was created to convince Java and C# developers to use JS. It have never felt about it like something that would make my code better or more organized. It…
your viewpoint might change when you're working on a large project with lots of developers and your system goes down in production because of a type mismatch the compiler could have easily let you know about long before you deployed (i speak from experience).
All it takes is once and you'll become a statically typed language evangelist.
Re: Deno will stop using TypeScript
#25This is gonna be an unpopular opinion but as someone who learned to program in loosely typed languages, I have never seen the TS appeal. TS feels like something that was created to lure programmers who couldn’t wrap their heads around JS loose nature. Almost like it was created to convince Java and C# developers to use JS. It have never felt about it like something that would make my code better or more organized. It…
I've been programming for 40 years and I agree. Strong typing has a religious quality. You have to believe that most errors are caused by type mismatch, and I simply don't believe that. Most errors, in my experience, are caused by bad architecture, poor documentation, and poor communications strategies between MVC, etc.
Re: Deno will stop using TypeScript
#26Has anyone else experienced these issues? This reads more like product placement for Deno than a sincere criticism of TS.
Re: Deno will stop using TypeScript
#27Thank God, I would really appreciate this. The TypeScript usage was the one thing that I didn't like about Deno. Why add complexity to a new project which starts from scratch? JavaScript is good enough and there's no need to make it confusing by adding another layer.
You can use JavaScript with Deno. Nobody is forcing you to use TypeScript.
This doesn't change anything, it's for their internals. Why anyone would ditch static typing on a large collaborative project is beyond me though.
Re: Deno will stop using TypeScript
#28This is gonna be an unpopular opinion but as someone who learned to program in loosely typed languages, I have never seen the TS appeal. TS feels like something that was created to lure programmers who couldn’t wrap their heads around JS loose nature. Almost like it was created to convince Java and C# developers to use JS. It have never felt about it like something that would make my code better or more organized. It…
> TS feels like something that was created to lure programmers who couldn’t wrap their heads around JS loose nature.
TypeScript adds additional type checking at transpile time to code. The assumption that the people who can write code with these more rigorous checks can't write the same code with it all removed ... I would examine that a little more closely.
Re: Deno will stop using TypeScript
#29This is gonna be an unpopular opinion but as someone who learned to program in loosely typed languages, I have never seen the TS appeal. TS feels like something that was created to lure programmers who couldn’t wrap their heads around JS loose nature. Almost like it was created to convince Java and C# developers to use JS. It have never felt about it like something that would make my code better or more organized. It…
You don’t see the benefits of a strongly typed language?
I do. But not for JS in particular. At the end of the day 95% of JS that is written in classic JS and is used in thousands of high-scale projects like that.
Re: Deno will stop using TypeScript
#30Why such a large, important project would want to drop static types is beyond me. > TypeScript isn’t proving itself helpful to organize Deno code. On the contrary, the Deno team is experiencing the opposite effect. One of the issues mentioned is that they ended up with duplicate independent Body classes in two locations This feels like process immaturity or unfamiliarity. Thousands of other projects manage to do just…
Lisp is large, important, and also not statically typed. It's worked out ok for Lisp programmers. JS itself isn't strongly typed and is the most successful and important language in the world (probably in the history of programming), so that's two game-changers that don't require static typing.
JavaScript is the most popular language solely because it's the only one that runs in webbrowsers natively. The language itself is not good, it's rather bad from a language designer's point of view.