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.
I don’t really get the appeal of strongly typed languages. Can’t you just use try/catch blocks, and/or use functional programming and return early if the data structure of whatever you’re working with isn’t what you expected?
I guess it can help older code easier to maintain because the expected data structure is right there, but you could also just include it in a comment above the function.
I personally find TS slows down initial production of a project and raises so many unnecessary errors.
Is there some huge benefit that I’m missing? Because I don’t really get the appeal. I mean, I do on some level, but I don’t really understand why so many people are absolutely obsessed with TS.
Is there some huge benefit that I’m missing?
For example I recently fixed a bug where a function would return an integer 99.9999% of the time, but the other 0.0001% returned a float. The actual value came from a HTTP request, so it started out as a string and the code was relying on dynamic typing to convert that string to a type that could be operated on with math.
In testing, the code only ever encountered integer values. About two years later, I discovered customer credit cards were charged the wrong amount of money if it was a float value. There was no exception, there was nothing visible in the user interface, it just charged the card the wrong amount.
Thankfully I’m experienced enough to have seen errors like this before - and I had code in place comparing the actual amount charged to the amount on the customer invoice… and that code did throw an exception. But still, it took two years for the first exception to be thrown, and then about a week for me to prioritise the issue, track down the line of code that was broken, and deploy a fix.
In a strongly typed language, my IDE would have flagged the line of code in red as I was typing it, I would’ve been like “oh… right” and fixed it in two seconds.
Yes — there are times when typing is a bit of a headache and requires extra busywork casting values and such. But that is more than made up for by time saved fixing mistakes as you write code instead of fixing mistakes after they happen in production.
Having said that, I don’t use TypeScript, because I think it’s only recently become a mature enough to be a good choice… and WASM is so close to being in the same state which will allow me to use even better typed languages. Ones that were designed to be strongly typed from the ground up instead of added to an existing dynamically typed language.
I don’t see much point in switching things now, I’ll wait for WASM and use Rust or Swift.
The only valid argument against typescript is that it is too similar to vanilla JavaScript. It does not go far enough. We need type systems like Ocaml’s.
I suppose you can also complain about needing a build step, but I find this silly. There are so many tools that make this easy or automatic.
What’s so special about Ocaml’s type system?
I won’t remember everything, but one very important things comes to mind:
in Typescript, it is very difficult to assert on a type (let me know if you’re not familiar with what I mean by this and I can explain further). In OCaml, this is trivial using pattern matching.
Why would you need that? The idea of a type system is it doesn’t let you apply a function on a structure without the structure being of the right type. But the lack of type assertion in TS makes people follow hacky workarounds, which defeat the purpose of type system.
There are a couple of other things, like immutable types by default, automatic tail call optimization, functors enabling higher kinded types, etc.
Also in ocaml, you don’t have to annotate any types on any variable or parameter, and you’ll still get full type protection.
Oh, so what you’re describing is strong typing. I thought it was a unique feature of Ocaml. But in reality, any strong-typed language will have this as well.
And yeah, Typescript merely “suggests” typing, and it will allow you to build the project even if you ignore the type errors. A build system refusing to, well, build, if there are typing errors usually takes care of this, but again, the dev team may as well not implement this.
Any examples other than ocaml? From my understanding, ocaml’s type strength may only be found in a couple other languages. Haskell, scala, and maybe Rust. Any others?
I thought of Pascal, Java and C#, but pretty much any language listed here as “explicit / nominal / static” makes the cut:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_languages_by_type_system
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.
