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TypeScript support added to Create React App

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Re: TypeScript support added to Create React App

#41

Post by netcraft »

swatcoder wrote: post #37
netcraft wrote: post #6

offtopic, but I'm in the middle of trying to convince my small team to pick up typescript for a new significant node backend for our company. It seems like a no-brainer from my perspective. Compilation is fast, we would use `strict` but would allow devs to default to `any` if the types got too hard. There are no downsides but so many upsides - better refactoring, intellisense, documentation, communication of interfac…

If you have influence over these kinds of decisions, then I expect have the experience to know that every choice has downsides. If you haven't found any yet, that should be a Big Red Flag to you. It means you've let yourself get blinded by hype. The good news is that you're part of a team, and your team will probably be able to point some out to you. Listen to them. Once you've finally gotten yourself a sense of both…

I responded to someone else saying this, but I guess it bears repeating. I'm not saying its a free lunch - it is a build step - there are things to learn - some of the more esoteric types can be very hard to understand. I exaggerated when I said there was no downsides, what I mean to say is that in the cost benefit analysis as I see it so far, the benefits massively outweigh the costs. I've written a fair bit of TS so far and I find it hard to imagine writing a significant side code base without it in JS-land.

I'm not blinded by the hype, im here asking people for what they see as the downsides, the reasons they may have or have heard of why teams didn't pick TS (or better yet did and had some reason it didn't work out).

Re: TypeScript support added to Create React App

#42

Post by netcraft »

qudat wrote: post #30
netcraft wrote: post #6

offtopic, but I'm in the middle of trying to convince my small team to pick up typescript for a new significant node backend for our company. It seems like a no-brainer from my perspective. Compilation is fast, we would use `strict` but would allow devs to default to `any` if the types got too hard. There are no downsides but so many upsides - better refactoring, intellisense, documentation, communication of interfac…

If people are not onboard with the the idea then it might be an uphill battle. There is value in TS but it will be frustrating at times, you will get resistance from other developers, and every once in awhile it will not feel worth it. The other issue is that if people don't know what they are doing with TS, then imo it's worthless. I don't know your experience level with TS, but it is a non-trivial problem to build…

I wouldnt call myself an expert by any means, and sure there are lots of complicated types out there - but I feel we would get 90% of the benefits if all we did was 1) turn on the compiler in the first place 2) document the argument and return types of functions and 3) build some general interfaces of objects we are passing around.

If we bailed out and typed anything more complicated as `any` it would still be a huge improvement over writing vanilla js IMO.

Re: TypeScript support added to Create React App

#43

Post by Nican »

acemarke wrote: post #25
chris_st wrote: post #23

I'd love to use TypeScript, but I've hit walls of errors that are nearly as bad as the old C++ template errors! (Though to be fair, this was a while ago, the compiler may have improved). SO: Any good way to learn TypeScript, particularly the more complicated types?

What sort of errors are you running into, and what project setup are you using? If you're using Create-React-App-TS, that's a separate fork of CRA 1.x that adds TS support, and has _horribly_ restrictive lint rules (many common style practices are treated as _compile_ errors). See https://github.com/wmonk/create-react-app-typescript/issues/... for discussion. (I ran across this while trying to set up a TS project for…

I use TypeScript every day, and I like it way better than JavaScript, but here is an example of a bad error message: http://ss.nican.net/photo_2018-10-22_22-09-58.jpg

Re: TypeScript support added to Create React App

#44

Post by Rotareti »

karmakaze wrote: post #11

BTW, anyone here used ReastReason, BuckleScript is it? I've been meaning to look into it but don't have a sense of the payoff. I read that it can coexist which is a great feature. Wonder how it compares to a TypeScript workflow.

If you find yourself using ImmutableJS, Ramda, Recompose, etc. in your React project, you should have a look at ReasonReact. It felt like a breath of fresh air to me.

Re: TypeScript support added to Create React App

#45

Post by natural219 »

netcraft wrote: post #6

offtopic, but I'm in the middle of trying to convince my small team to pick up typescript for a new significant node backend for our company. It seems like a no-brainer from my perspective. Compilation is fast, we would use `strict` but would allow devs to default to `any` if the types got too hard. There are no downsides but so many upsides - better refactoring, intellisense, documentation, communication of interfac…

The tradeoff between flexibility and reliability in the interface engineering world is very poorly understood. There's several dozen layers of reliability abstractions you can add to your Javascript code. Each one individually is probably a smart idea; taken together, you can create an endless array of overhead to even complex Javascript apps that massively reduce flexibility and slow down the iterative process if you want to continue improving and experimenting on your UI.

Re: TypeScript support added to Create React App

#46

Post by scns »

karmakaze wrote: post #11

BTW, anyone here used ReastReason, BuckleScript is it? I've been meaning to look into it but don't have a sense of the payoff. I read that it can coexist which is a great feature. Wonder how it compares to a TypeScript workflow.

Error messages could be better, Elm has set the bar in that regard.

Types are inferred, i only had to write a type once to disambiguate. Fearless Refactoring. If it compiles it works, except if you built in some logic errors. The compiler will find all syntactic and type errors, which might feel annoying at first but if you reframe it into the compiler is helping you then it is fine.

Re: TypeScript support added to Create React App

#49

Post by BigJono »

dwaltrip wrote: post #21
matchbok wrote: post #19

Great to see. Any javascript project of reasonable size quickly eventually collapses under its own weight.

Typescript looks interesting and increasingly appealing -- it is high on my list of tech to explore. However, absolutist statements are not very useful... It shouldn't even need saying, but clearly large javascript projects do succeed from time to time.

"Time to time" is reductive even. Large Javascript projects succeed all the time, and have done for decades. This whole thread needs a bit of perspective, no matter what you think of Typescript, the web wasn't invented in 2015...

Re: TypeScript support added to Create React App

#50

Post by smt88 »

kumarharsh wrote: post #40
smt88 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TypeScript supports Flow-like type annotation in comments, which allows you to take advantage of static type-checking without transpiling. That's as much as I know about it. I don't use that feature because transpiling is such a minor issue that I can't imagine any universe in which I would use comment-style types, which are slightly more cumbersome to use.

That feature is for JS files. It helps you convert your JS project into flow/TS in a piecewise manner. Otherwise you'll have to do a major rewrite in a very short amount of time.

> Otherwise you'll have to do a major rewrite in a very short amount of time.

This just isn't true. TS was designed from the beginning to allow gradually adding types. Whether transpiling or using comments, you can change one file at a time.

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