4 ms·

Don't forget the confusing ADHD garbage tooling!

• rubber_duck 11y ago
  I feel like TypeScript could make JS a decent language if Microsoft starts going more ambitious with it - they really need to do a Dart style integration - official package manager, build system, full es5 transpiler, std lib polyfill included. So far they have been conservative and focused only on typing but they could offer insane value if they started offering a full language expirience like Dart
  • ludamad 11y ago
    It's an excellent tool. It does make JS a decent language. A package manager is not necessary, it can work with npm. A build system is not necessary, existing build systems support it. I believe they will eventually do full polyfill. However, the compiler is very high quality and that doesn't happen by accident. They have to make hard design decisions to keep releasing features so regularly (they release features faster than I can keep up with sometimes). For now, you can target es6 and chain with babel.
    • mattmanser 11y ago
      It's better than javascript but it's still poor. You still run into wierd this scoping issues, the JS it actually produces is pretty fugly, there's still no standard libraries like decent languages have, every property accessor has to be prefixed with 'this.', etc. etc. And, ultimately, your code still ends up being a load of garbage boilerplate code like you're writing oldschool Java from the early 2000s. It's a nasty language written on top of a nastier one, lipstick on a pig.
      • ludamad 11y ago
        The extent to which all your points matter really depends, but I find myself able to use types just for some logic, and code in a functional style far removed from oldschool Java with lots of destructuring / structuring. I'm not denying it's a lipstick pig, but the improving-JavaScript situation is what it is, and it does a good job at doing it in an unopinionated way (which is why it's succeeding)
        • mattmanser 11y ago
          It all matters a lot. There are great languages available today and typescript isn't one of them. Why should we be forced to choose sub par languages? I don't see it as a long term solution. It's just the next coffeescript. It's part of the problem rather than a solution, the problem being the massive churn in the JS ecosystem as we desperately hunt for a way of writing JS code that isn't awful. The actual solution is to give us other languages in the browser. We need Python or Ruby or Go or C# or PHP or whatever. We need real choice, not javascript 2.0. If Firefox wanted to stay relevant today it could stop dogmatically promoting a broken language and that's what they'd be working on right now. They're too rigidly fixated on the past though.
          • gaze 11y ago
            How did PHP end up in that list?
    • rubber_duck 11y ago
      >A package manager is not necessary, it can work with npm. It can work with NPM - but what about bower, JSPM, whatever else hipster package manager everyone else uses ? It should specify TS supports NPM by default and it's the official package manager - you can use others at your own risk. Ditto for build system. Saying you can target ES6 with babel is completely missing my point - Dart developer experience is much much better than TS simply because it does all of these things - out of the box and without any decisions/interventions/ridiculously complicated build setups and dependency chains