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This doesn't conform with any of my experiences in non-trivial JS codebases. Migrating to TS tends to reveal previously overlooked implicit typing issues. Also,

by noema 6y ago

This doesn't conform with any of my experiences in non-trivial JS codebases. Migrating to TS tends to reveal previously overlooked implicit typing issues. Also, I find the "upfront productivity loss" of TS to be overstated: adding in annotations here and there doesn't take much time at all, and pays dividends quickly. Many hours have been lost tracking down some elusive runtime bug stemming from a typo in a vanilla JS property access.

jondubois 6y ago
In my career (which spans 15 years at over a dozen companies), I've built many complex front ends, complex backends with different database systems, a popular open source pub/sub server which auto-scales on Kubernetes across a cluster of machines, a P2P networking library with selective message routing/propagation (in a scalable partial mesh configuration), a scalable chat system, a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange (federated 2-way peg), a modular multi-process blockchain framework (which scales both horizontally and vertically) and many other complex projects; all of these written with plain JavaScript/Node.js, in record time and essentially bug-free (no major bugs reported so far on any of my projects since they were shipped). So I'm quite confident when I say that there is nothing wrong with JavaScript and dynamic typing. I've programmed in many different languages too; ActionScript, Delphi, C/C++, Java, Python, PHP, C#, AVR Assembly (ATMEGA8-16PU microcontroller)... I've also programmed a JavaScript UI front end for a TV set top box which had a custom JS engine. From my perspective, many among the TypeScript crowd are arrogant junior developers who regurgitate what they were taught by a bunch of academic bureaucrats who never actually built a single fully working system in their lives but who believe that their PhD qualifies them to tell everyone else about the many theoretical (but in fact, imaginary) benefits of functional programming and static typing... Benefits that not a single human soul has actually experienced themselves on a real large complex project. I've seen real-world complex FP projects; in all cases, the code was spaghetti; it's almost impossible to follow the logic because it jumps around too many modules and files; because all the state is kept in a single centralized place, instances end up getting passed around all over the place; traversing many intermediate modules to reach the target module; buried deep in the code... And there is no clear separation of concerns; it's hard to separate concerns when you fully decouple state from logic.

by noema 6y ago

jondubois 6y ago

In my career (which spans 15 years at over a dozen companies), I've built many complex front ends, complex backends with different database systems, a popular open source pub/sub server which auto-scales on Kubernetes across a cluster of machines, a P2P networking library with selective message routing/propagation (in a scalable partial mesh configuration), a scalable chat system, a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange (federated 2-way peg), a modular multi-process blockchain framework (which scales both horizontally and vertically) and many other complex projects; all of these written with plain JavaScript/Node.js, in record time and essentially bug-free (no major bugs reported so far on any of my projects since they were shipped). So I'm quite confident when I say that there is nothing wrong with JavaScript and dynamic typing. I've programmed in many different languages too; ActionScript, Delphi, C/C++, Java, Python, PHP, C#, AVR Assembly (ATMEGA8-16PU microcontroller)... I've also programmed a JavaScript UI front end for a TV set top box which had a custom JS engine. From my perspective, many among the TypeScript crowd are arrogant junior developers who regurgitate what they were taught by a bunch of academic bureaucrats who never actually built a single fully working system in their lives but who believe that their PhD qualifies them to tell everyone else about the many theoretical (but in fact, imaginary) benefits of functional programming and static typing... Benefits that not a single human soul has actually experienced themselves on a real large complex project. I've seen real-world complex FP projects; in all cases, the code was spaghetti; it's almost impossible to follow the logic because it jumps around too many modules and files; because all the state is kept in a single centralized place, instances end up getting passed around all over the place; traversing many intermediate modules to reach the target module; buried deep in the code... And there is no clear separation of concerns; it's hard to separate concerns when you fully decouple state from logic.