361–370 of 570 posts
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Flow (by Facebook) used to be fairly significant in the JavaScript several years ago, but right now it's somewhat clear that TypeScript has won rather handily.
Facebook never gave Flow enough resources, whereas Microsoft has had 10+ devs on TypeScript for a long time.
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Flow (by Facebook) used to be fairly significant in the JavaScript several years ago, but right now it's somewhat clear that TypeScript has won rather handily.
Flow tries to be sound and that makes it infinitely better than TS where the creators openly threw the idea of soundness out the window from the very beginning.
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If JS ever adds type checking, I hope it doesn't choose Typescript. We need a type system that is actually sound and TS is intentionally unsound. We need a type system that doesn't allow bad coding practices like TS does. We need a type system that enforces program design that allows programs to be fast. We need a Hindley Milner type system. If you want a module to be typed, add a `"use type"`. This should disallow b…
What bad coding practices does TS allow, and why are they bad?
Does TS help you keep your functions monomorphic so they'll get optimized by the JIT? nope
Does TS keep your object shape from changing so it will get optimized by the JIT? it actively does the opposite giving TONS of tools that allow you to add, remove, modify, and otherwise mess up your objects and guarantee your code will never optimize beyond the basic bytecode (making it one or two orders of magnitude more slow than it could otherwise be).
TS doesn't do anything to prevent or even discourage these kinds of bad decisions. They "type soup" many projects fall into is another symptom of this. The big reason the types become such a mess is because the underlying design is a mess. Instead of telling programmers "fix your mess", TS just releases even more features so you can type the terrible code without fixing it.
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Extensions should be required. It's not possible to do path searches over the network like you can on local disk, and network-attached VMs, like browsers, are a very, very important runtime for JavaScript.
Fortunately, code is generally bundled for browsers to reduce the number of network requests and total size of downloads. And node has access to the filesystem, so it can do path searches just fine if it wants to support existing code.
The Developer Experience of unbundled ESM is great. Of course you do need to do things like always use file extensions. But those aren't hard changes to make, worth it for the better Developer Experience, and if it can help us start to wean off of mega-bundler tools as required production compile time steps.
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"nor have tsc configured to automatically add .js extensions to its compiled output" It seems to be the default now: $echo 'console.log("test")' > t.ts $ tsc t.ts $ ls t.js t.ts $ node t.js test
What they probably meant was writing 'import "file.ts"' and have tsc emit 'import "file.js"'. https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/49083
I beg of thee, do not do this. I get that people love typescript but I am already running into a problem where javascript resources are written in typescript by default with nothing for regular javascript. This is the same problem that happened when JQuery hit its peak popularity and an overwhelming amount of resources and guides amounted to "Oh just do this in JQuery"
That's definitely a potential issue - JavaScript is the fundamental standard, not JQuery and not TypeScript. Certainly there are situations where maximum forward-compatibility is important (learning resources are a good example) and for those, vanilla JavaScript is the best choice.
All of the old resources that relied on JQuery are now hopelessly outdated, whereas the contemporary ones that used plain JavaScript are as valid now as when they were written. I'm sure the same will be true of TypeScript vs JavaScript when the next big thing comes along.
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Typescript is way better than Java, in my experience. It's a lot less verbose. A lot more flexible.
Better for what? Quickly churning out short-lived code to get the next round of funding, definitely. Writing (and _supporting_) "serious" projects over the long term, which also require high performance and/or high scalability, and can rip through terabytes of data if needed, definitely not. (All IMHO from lots of personal experience.)
I really enjoy typescript and have been yearning for a typescript runtime but I can't help but laugh that I left java all those years ago to finally seek something a lot closer to java. I guess we all just wanted java with JIT, more feature rich type system and gradual typing. Also for all the shortcomings of npm ecosystem, it is a lot less daunting and more fun to be using libraries in this ecosystem. And surprising…
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Flow tries to be sound and that makes it infinitely better than TS where the creators openly threw the idea of soundness out the window from the very beginning.
Can you explain what you mean when you say "to be sound"?
I personally would very much prefer if NPM modules that have their original code in TS and are currently transpiling would stop shipping dist/.cjs so I unambiguously know where to put my debugger/console.log statements. And it would probably be very tempting to NPM contributors to not have to bother with a build step anymore.
But won't this start a ripple effect through NPM where everyone will start to assume very quickly 'everyone accepts TS files' - it only takes one of your dependencies for this effect to ripple through? It seems to me that nodejs can't move this outside an opt-in-experimental-flag without the whole community implicitly expecting all consumers to accept TS files before you know it. And if they do, it will be just months before Firefox and Safari will be force to accept it too, so all JS compilers will have to discard TS type annotations
Which I would personally be happy with - we're building transcompiling steps into NPM modules that convert the ts code into js and d.ts just to support some hypothetical JS user even though we're using TS on the including side. But if node accepts .ts files we could just remove those transpiling steps without ever noticing it... so what's stopping NPM publishers from publishing js/d.ts files without noticing they broke anything?