A few days ago, David Heinemeier Hansson
announced
that Turbo 8
is dropping TypeScript
. I'm okay with that because I don't even know what Turbo 8 is. However, over the past few years, some frontend programmers have tried to sell me the idea that "TypeScript is useless, just use tests". I think people with such opinions either don't care about code quality or simply don't know what TypeScript is. Here, I will explain why you should use TypeScript.
Actually, if you really care about quality and types on the front end rust+wasm is not a bad idea 🤔
Now that I’ve typed that and read it back, were people using TypeScript for anything other than front-end web dev?
Because at the end of the day TypeScript is still Javascript and it’s still bad. Just has some verbose formats to try and make weakly typed language (javascript) appear to be strongly typed. It adds more build steps to what shouldn’t be there; build steps make sense for apps, they make much less sense for libraries.
https://dev.to/bettercodingacademy/typescript-is-a-waste-of-time-change-my-mind-pi8
https://medium.com/@tsecretdeveloper/typescript-is-wrong-for-you-875a09e10176
I’m sorry. Whoever wrote that should give up trying to write articles. It’s poorly written and will never convince anyone to change their mind. It’s shit. “I know how to convince people they’re wrong. Insult them. Setup a ton of strawman arguments. Genius.”
Whoever wrote that is bad and should feel bad.
Which one? There were multiple links in that comment.
Second one. Just realized there were two. Being close together and the first being long enough to get trailing “…” it all just looked like one big link when I first saw it. May just be Kbin displaying it that way.
This might be true, but it’s not about build steps, it’s about having detailed iformation of the types of the objects that the library is serving. not knowing the typing of the functions a library is serving is… poor. Maybe typescript is too strict and having something like type hinting like python has would be enough since linters pick up the hints from the libraries, but doing just JS only fuck the people that use the library.
It was used pretty frequently for back end APIs too
That is disturbing. From my perspective, anyway. There are already so many great (and more appropriate) stacks for web backends, why Frankenstein a Frankenstein into it?
Well, usually because you’ve got a team of frontend folks needing to do a backend.
There’s one other advantage, which is that you can have a compile-time shared model between backend and frontend. You also have that advantage with WASM, but not with a traditional backend/frontend technology split…
Compile time is my biggest issue with TypeScript. I’ve used JavaScript for decades with compile time measured in, what, a millisecond or two. Having to wait for TypeScript drives me nuts.
🤷 people like nodejs and people like type hinting and IDE reflection. Typescript helps a lot with that
We use TypeScript for our node.js backends.
We had two that started out vanilla, but it became too painful to maintain.
I wrote some TypeScript modules to process a bunch of documentation in markdown to a ton of output formats via pandoc + latex.
No real reason for it, except that I was able to start with the export module of a node-based thing written in JavaScript and iterate from there until I had a working system in CI/CD.
That’s actually pretty neat!