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I do not believe compilation nor a type system belong in JavaScript. It's better to have something like "Flow" that does static analysis of the code as you writ

by z3t4 10y ago

I do not believe compilation nor a type system belong in JavaScript. It's better to have something like "Flow" that does static analysis of the code as you write. I might even go as far as putting on a "tin foil hat" and state that Typescript is a trick to lock you into their proprietary ecosystem of expensive tools that everyone have to buy into just to communicate with you once you are locked in.

Longwelwind 10y ago
Why not ? I only see advantages for static typing for a small cost of time: you prevent most of Type Error from happening, you get automatic auto-completion, refactoring errors are easier to catch and feel safer. Either way, you need to specify the type of the arguments in the documentation of your function (I can sometimes even find the C# LINQ's function I'm looking for just by looking at the return type of the list of function). You could even use Flow and Typescript to catch Aside from the proprietary reasons (which I believe are unfounded since the whole Typescript ecosystem is opensource), why do you think static typing doesn't belong in Javascript ?
- z3t4 10y ago
  Because JavaScript has semantic types like List, Date, Number, String, Boolean, witch can easily be figured out by their context, like age is a number, name is a a string, married is a boolean, children is a list, born is a date, and adding type declarations are unnecessary, witch would only add extra cognitive load to the programmer. It's possible to be an productive JavaScript programmer without even knowing about types and how they are implemented. If the programmer however makes a mistake, like concatenating name and age, it will be caught during runtime, manually testing, automatic testing, runtime testing, or real time static analysis, or all of these five. Being able to concatenate and mix types like number and string is also a language feature that avoids a lot of boilerplate code.
d0100 10y ago
True, VS Code is so damn expensive!
- oblio 10y ago
  And so proprietary! :)
lsadam0 10y ago
My team is 'locked' into TS on a large project. We have yet to purchase any TS related tooling, and have no plans or need to do so. Given that TS transpiles to JS, I'm unsure as to how any project can be truly 'locked' into the ecosystem. I'm really unsure what you are basing your fears upon.
- DrJokepu 10y ago
  It's not just that it transpiles into JS, if you target ES6 pretty much all tsc does besides validation is stripping type information, access modifiers etc. while basically preserving the code structure, including whitespace. Which means that if you ever want to migrate away from TypeScript you simply run tsc one last time and then you'll have a fairly usable JS codebase.
lmm 10y ago
> It's better to have something like "Flow" that does static analysis of the code as you write. What do you think is the advantage of such a thing? IME they tend to end up as an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a type system.
Allower 10y ago
Lol what part of Typescript do you have to pay for?
KirinDave 10y ago
> I might even go as far as putting on a "tin foil hat" and state that Typescript is a trick to lock you into their proprietary ecosystem of expensive tools that everyone have to buy into just to communicate with you once you are locked in. https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript is uh... right there. Check the license. Visual Studio code runs Textmate snippets and has a very sublime-like extension system. There is no vendor lock in.

by z3t4 10y ago

Longwelwind 10y ago

Why not ? I only see advantages for static typing for a small cost of time: you prevent most of Type Error from happening, you get automatic auto-completion, refactoring errors are easier to catch and feel safer. Either way, you need to specify the type of the arguments in the documentation of your function (I can sometimes even find the C# LINQ's function I'm looking for just by looking at the return type of the list of function). You could even use Flow and Typescript to catch Aside from the proprietary reasons (which I believe are unfounded since the whole Typescript ecosystem is opensource), why do you think static typing doesn't belong in Javascript ?

z3t4 10y ago
Because JavaScript has semantic types like List, Date, Number, String, Boolean, witch can easily be figured out by their context, like age is a number, name is a a string, married is a boolean, children is a list, born is a date, and adding type declarations are unnecessary, witch would only add extra cognitive load to the programmer. It's possible to be an productive JavaScript programmer without even knowing about types and how they are implemented. If the programmer however makes a mistake, like concatenating name and age, it will be caught during runtime, manually testing, automatic testing, runtime testing, or real time static analysis, or all of these five. Being able to concatenate and mix types like number and string is also a language feature that avoids a lot of boilerplate code.

d0100 10y ago

True, VS Code is so damn expensive!

oblio 10y ago
And so proprietary! :)

lsadam0 10y ago

My team is 'locked' into TS on a large project. We have yet to purchase any TS related tooling, and have no plans or need to do so. Given that TS transpiles to JS, I'm unsure as to how any project can be truly 'locked' into the ecosystem. I'm really unsure what you are basing your fears upon.

DrJokepu 10y ago
It's not just that it transpiles into JS, if you target ES6 pretty much all tsc does besides validation is stripping type information, access modifiers etc. while basically preserving the code structure, including whitespace. Which means that if you ever want to migrate away from TypeScript you simply run tsc one last time and then you'll have a fairly usable JS codebase.

lmm 10y ago

> It's better to have something like "Flow" that does static analysis of the code as you write. What do you think is the advantage of such a thing? IME they tend to end up as an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a type system.

Allower 10y ago

Lol what part of Typescript do you have to pay for?

KirinDave 10y ago

> I might even go as far as putting on a "tin foil hat" and state that Typescript is a trick to lock you into their proprietary ecosystem of expensive tools that everyone have to buy into just to communicate with you once you are locked in. https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript is uh... right there. Check the license. Visual Studio code runs Textmate snippets and has a very sublime-like extension system. There is no vendor lock in.