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This is something often overlooked by fans of typing. On the surface it may appear to some as being strongly typed, but it's a mirage [1] and frequently require

This is something often overlooked by fans of typing. On the surface it may appear to some as being strongly typed, but it's a mirage [1] and frequently requires a lot more lifting, e.g. writing specific typings to work around shortcomings, just to make the types play nice together. That's not a feature of a strongly typed language, it's a feature of statically type-checked languages or schemas. I still use TypeScript, and I understand the benefits, but I'm not always a fan and will write plain JS when it fits better than TS. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15090561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15090561

k__ 5y ago
I didn't like TypeScript when writing frontend only code, because the the iteration speed is just so fast in the browser. But when I started using it for backend and infra, the iteration speed is much slower, so even TS only saves a few % of deploys, it's still a noticeable amount of absolute time.
- handrous 5y ago
  Typescript is miraculously productive on the front-end as soon as you've got people writing at different "layers"—someone writing a frontend library, someone else handling state and actions, someone writing components for re-use, someone making it look pretty and using those components. You can be sitting right next to someone using code you wrote but rarely need to discuss it because the types communicate everything so damn well.
twooster 5y ago
I've seen this take so many times an I simply don't get it. The notion that TypeScript can't be (some form of) strongly-typed because Javascript is (some form of) weakly-typed is just silly. CPUs are entirely weakly typed in this sense and this doesn't impact the typings of languages built on top. JavaScript is strongly typed in the sense that every value has a well-defined type. It's weak in the sense that it has implicit conversion between types in a lot of cases, but it's not as though those conversions don't follow particular rules if you know the types. TypeScript gives you accurate static typing on top of that, so long as you don't use `any` as an escape. Arguably, `JSON.parse` returning `any` is the 1-million dollar mistake of TypeScript, because it leads a lot of people to think that they get automatic runtime typechecking for free, which they obviously don't, which leads to comments about how bad/slippery TypeScript is stemming from their misunderstanding. In my experience, you only need to work around typings in TypeScript when you're dealing with some absurdly designed API that only made sense in the super-flexible world of olden-days JavaScript, or perhaps if you're doing some meta-programming, generating class definitions on the fly or such.
- andrew_ 5y ago
  > I've seen this take so many times an I simply don't get it. That may sincerely be, because how it feels as you're using it doesn't align with the objective truths of how it behaves. The definition of a strongly typed language has been well-cemented for some time. TypeScript does not completely align with that definition, thus it cannot be considered truly strongly typed.
  - twooster 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_and_weak_typing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_and_weak_typing Wikipedia disagrees with you in the opening paragraph about strong and weak typing: it's contentious. For all practical purposes that I can think of, TypeScript creates a strongly typed environment. The problem comes when you're interacting with non-typed (or, worse, incorrectly-manually-typed) libraries, or misuse `any`. Honestly, I'd be interested to see a pure TypeScript program and where weak typing comes in. There are definitely a couple of language escapes (again, `JSON.parse`, previously `fn.bind`), but these are going away as TS gains better inference and type-propagation logic.
  - wruza 5y ago
    The definition of a strongly typed language has been well-cemented for some time What is it? Is e.g. C++ strongly typed in that sense?
manigandham 5y ago
All typing is a mirage, enforced at various levels by various tools, whether that's a compiler during the build or a VM during runtime. Everything gets compiled down to the same machine code in the end.

k__ 5y ago

I didn't like TypeScript when writing frontend only code, because the the iteration speed is just so fast in the browser. But when I started using it for backend and infra, the iteration speed is much slower, so even TS only saves a few % of deploys, it's still a noticeable amount of absolute time.

handrous 5y ago
Typescript is miraculously productive on the front-end as soon as you've got people writing at different "layers"—someone writing a frontend library, someone else handling state and actions, someone writing components for re-use, someone making it look pretty and using those components. You can be sitting right next to someone using code you wrote but rarely need to discuss it because the types communicate everything so damn well.

twooster 5y ago

I've seen this take so many times an I simply don't get it. The notion that TypeScript can't be (some form of) strongly-typed because Javascript is (some form of) weakly-typed is just silly. CPUs are entirely weakly typed in this sense and this doesn't impact the typings of languages built on top. JavaScript is strongly typed in the sense that every value has a well-defined type. It's weak in the sense that it has implicit conversion between types in a lot of cases, but it's not as though those conversions don't follow particular rules if you know the types. TypeScript gives you accurate static typing on top of that, so long as you don't use `any` as an escape. Arguably, `JSON.parse` returning `any` is the 1-million dollar mistake of TypeScript, because it leads a lot of people to think that they get automatic runtime typechecking for free, which they obviously don't, which leads to comments about how bad/slippery TypeScript is stemming from their misunderstanding. In my experience, you only need to work around typings in TypeScript when you're dealing with some absurdly designed API that only made sense in the super-flexible world of olden-days JavaScript, or perhaps if you're doing some meta-programming, generating class definitions on the fly or such.

andrew_ 5y ago
> I've seen this take so many times an I simply don't get it. That may sincerely be, because how it feels as you're using it doesn't align with the objective truths of how it behaves. The definition of a strongly typed language has been well-cemented for some time. TypeScript does not completely align with that definition, thus it cannot be considered truly strongly typed.
- twooster 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_and_weak_typing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_and_weak_typing Wikipedia disagrees with you in the opening paragraph about strong and weak typing: it's contentious. For all practical purposes that I can think of, TypeScript creates a strongly typed environment. The problem comes when you're interacting with non-typed (or, worse, incorrectly-manually-typed) libraries, or misuse `any`. Honestly, I'd be interested to see a pure TypeScript program and where weak typing comes in. There are definitely a couple of language escapes (again, `JSON.parse`, previously `fn.bind`), but these are going away as TS gains better inference and type-propagation logic.
- wruza 5y ago
  The definition of a strongly typed language has been well-cemented for some time What is it? Is e.g. C++ strongly typed in that sense?

manigandham 5y ago

All typing is a mirage, enforced at various levels by various tools, whether that's a compiler during the build or a VM during runtime. Everything gets compiled down to the same machine code in the end.