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It's an unfortunate situation, because so long as people are writing popular frameworks/libraries that horribly abuse the dynamic nature of JavaScript, the Type

It's an unfortunate situation, because so long as people are writing popular frameworks/libraries that horribly abuse the dynamic nature of JavaScript, the TypeScript team sort of has no choice but to try and wrestle the language into supporting it. But I agree that this is getting out of hand. I still like TypeScript but with each new release it's getting harder to claim with a straight face that it's "easier" than vanilla JS when you have to grok this increasingly convoluted type system.

munificent 6y ago
> horribly abuse the dynamic nature of JavaScript It's not a horrible abuse if you aren't trying to make the framework/library statically typed in the first place. Idiomatic APIs for dynamically typed languages use the flexibility of dynamic types. Idiomatic APIs for statically typed languages use the structure of static types. The problem comes when you try to put one into the other's world. It's like watching a fish flop around on land. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with fish locomotion, it's just not optimized for that environment.
- ImprobableTruth 6y ago
  >It's not a horrible abuse if you aren't trying to make the framework/library statically typed in the first place. Of course it is, because even if there's no type system the people using the library still have to make sense of the complexity. A function with a dozen, context-sensitive overloads that accepts data without a clear pattern isn't just hard to type, it's also hard to understand for a user. Even with dynamic typing you should be able to clearly state what a function does.
bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
Presumably, to work with the original JavaScript, you still had to understand the convoluted type system that you created, or else be ok with not being able to reason about your code. At least with typescript you have the computer helping you reason about it.
- badlucklottery 6y ago
  Yup. It's an attempt to formalize the mess that already exists in many JS libraries. That's why, even if I don't plan on using Typescript itself for a project, I prefer libraries that have type declarations or are natively Typescript. It shows the library authors at least attempted to understand the type system they were creating.
tengbretson 6y ago
My favorite part about typescript becoming ubiquitous is that it is making people into more disciplined JavaScript programmers. The amount of cutesy overloading that was common in the early node days seems to be slowly waning.
- mssundaram 6y ago
  > cutesy overloading Haha, great way to put it

munificent 6y ago

> horribly abuse the dynamic nature of JavaScript It's not a horrible abuse if you aren't trying to make the framework/library statically typed in the first place. Idiomatic APIs for dynamically typed languages use the flexibility of dynamic types. Idiomatic APIs for statically typed languages use the structure of static types. The problem comes when you try to put one into the other's world. It's like watching a fish flop around on land. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with fish locomotion, it's just not optimized for that environment.

ImprobableTruth 6y ago
>It's not a horrible abuse if you aren't trying to make the framework/library statically typed in the first place. Of course it is, because even if there's no type system the people using the library still have to make sense of the complexity. A function with a dozen, context-sensitive overloads that accepts data without a clear pattern isn't just hard to type, it's also hard to understand for a user. Even with dynamic typing you should be able to clearly state what a function does.

bobbylarrybobby 6y ago

Presumably, to work with the original JavaScript, you still had to understand the convoluted type system that you created, or else be ok with not being able to reason about your code. At least with typescript you have the computer helping you reason about it.

badlucklottery 6y ago
Yup. It's an attempt to formalize the mess that already exists in many JS libraries. That's why, even if I don't plan on using Typescript itself for a project, I prefer libraries that have type declarations or are natively Typescript. It shows the library authors at least attempted to understand the type system they were creating.

tengbretson 6y ago

My favorite part about typescript becoming ubiquitous is that it is making people into more disciplined JavaScript programmers. The amount of cutesy overloading that was common in the early node days seems to be slowly waning.

mssundaram 6y ago
> cutesy overloading Haha, great way to put it