I was talking to my manager the other day, discussing the languages we are using at $dayjob. He kind of offhandedly said that he thinks TypeScript is a temporary fad and soon everything will go back to using JavaScript. He doesn’t like that it’s made by Microsoft either.
I’m not a frontend developer so I don’t really know, but my general impression is that everything is moving more and more towards TypeScript, not away from it. But maybe I’m wrong?
Does anyone who actually works with TypeScript have any impression about this?
TypeScript might not be here to stay, but typed JavaScript definitely is. I’ve switched to writing 100% TypeScript, and haven’t looked back. The fact that just adding types to one of my (admittedly more complex) libraries surfaced 3 unknown bugs was eye opening to me.
Static typing, for the win, and I’ll die on this hill.
Typescript makes writing Javascript a reasonable thing to do. Your manager is a fad.
Your manager is a fad.
If only…
CoffeeScript was a fad, but TypeScript seems to gaining more and more popularity these days, with new runtimes like deno supporting them natively. TypeScript finally gave Microsoft relevancy again in webdev world, so I bet they’ll go a great length to make sure it stays that way. If Microsoft were still making their own browser engine, I bet they’ll make it natively supports TypeScript too.
CoffeeScript was a fad because it didn’t solve anyone’s problems. It was basically “look how cool code you can write”.
TypeScript is gaining popularity because static typing solves real problems. It’s also a superset of JavaScript instead of being a completely new language from scratch, which makes it easier for JavaScript devs to learn.
5 years ago everything was moving to TypeScript. Now everything has moved. Developers are still catching up, but it will be one-way traffic from here.
I’m guessing your manager thinks TypeScript is like CoffeeScript. It is not like CoffeeScript.
Also, TypeScript is only the beginning. In the halls of the tech giants most devs view TypeScript as a sticking plaster until things can be moved to webassembly. It will be a long time until that makes any dent in JS, but it will also be one-way traffic when it does.
I hope not. I’m pretty sure me and my coworkers would be at each others’ throats if it were not for some form of typed JS holding our Frankenstein codebase together.
What’s the point of calling something a “fad”? If the technology works well and it provides value to you, why should you care what other people think?
(Example: Look at PHP)
Unfortunately when it comes to my manager, I can’t just ignore what he says as his opinions actually has an influence on what technology we use and such.
I’m not a FE guy so don’t write it much, but I’d always rather use typescript if I had to use anything like JS. Our FE guys use typescript at my current job and my previous one as well
When anyone in a professional setting says they don’t like having a mega corp supporting something I lose a bit of respect for their opinion tbh.
Yes we all know mega corps suck.
But if you’re using anything in a professional production environment that is meant to last in the long term this is 100% what you want.
He might’ve watched this video: https://youtu.be/5ChkQKUzDCs
TL;DR: Big projects, like Svelte, Drizzle and Turbo ditched TypeScript
The developer of Svelte moved from Typescript to JSDoc and explained in depth in an interview (you can find it on youtube). ECMA (the dudes making Javascript/ECMAscript) also started noticing that maybe static typing would be useful and there’s a proposal to add typing to it. Whether that’s moving forward or not, no idea, but if it were to come to vanillaJS, it’s imaginable that typescript would be much less useful than it is now.
