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I've spent the last two years working with TypeScript solely. Coming from ~20 years with PHP and using Kotlin and Dart for some years as well, I feel that I'm d

by repox 4y ago

I've spent the last two years working with TypeScript solely. Coming from ~20 years with PHP and using Kotlin and Dart for some years as well, I feel that I'm doing something wrong. I absolutely loathe working with TypeScript. The community is the most fragmented I've ever experienced, the silly amount of package managers, builders... TypeScript just doesn't fit with me.

rroot 4y ago
Typescript itself is fine. But yes, if you are using 3rd party libraries and frameworks with typescript, you might wonder if it's too late to change career and become a monk.
int_19h 4y ago
You're describing issues with the underlying JS ecosystem. TS builds on that, and while it can paper over the language deficiencies, the libraries and frameworks are down to the larger community with its culture of constant churn.
robocat 4y ago
That is the same as saying you hate Kotlin because Android annoys you. Or blaming JavaScript for the browser DOM. Please correctly blame the ecosystem that you dislike, instead of thoughtlessly using a language as a label for an ecosystem.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  It’s my impression GP doesn’t have a clear picture of where TypeScript ends and the rest of the tooling ecosystem begins. Which is totally understandable, especially given how pervasive TypeScript is and how it nearly totally overlaps with the rest. I think you and I have similar perspectives on the details, but you could be kinder expressing them.
  - robocat 4y ago
    I assumed repox prefers bluntness, due to their writing style. I was careful with the words and tone that I chose. Checking comment history, repox wrote that they are a Dane (which I didn't know). My experience of friends from other nearby countries is that their style of interaction can be seen as rude by many people. In particular my stereotype is that Americans often prefer a more gentle approach. I think you are assuming I am not being respectful. However I believe that a blunt reply is definitely showing respect to them in this situation. I do need to be careful not to make comments that are personal attacks (or that could be mistaken for), which I certainly was not trying to do. (To quote you: "you’re making the claim, you defend it. Otherwise the assumption is just, like, your opinion man." ;) Hopefully repox can reply, although they don't often comment, so I would guess they are unlikely to check replies. Anyways, definitely off topic!
    - eyelidlessness 4y ago
      Hey, I mistake appropriateness of being blunt too. I’m autistic, so. I’m kind of impressed you dug through my recent comment history, even if the quote feels misplaced. Anyway feel free to be blunt with me, if you recognize me around. But I’ll also be blunt when I notice a critique is probably misplaced.
      - robocat 4y ago
        All good. To explain: I quickly scanned some of their recent comments to see if my assumptions could be wrong. When I noticed they were Danish, I then wondered if you were American, so I used hn.algolia.com to scan your comments for “American” as a keyword. You said you were, but at that point I luckily noticed the comment of yours that I quoted, which I just couldn’t resist cheekily passing back to you, because it fitted the discussion on comment quality at a meta level</smirk>. I often write personal notes like this after the topic has dropped from the front page. If there are a lot of people still reading the comment threads, I try harder to not be a distraction to others and I try to keep on topic. I really do appreciate your effort to keep my comment quality high - if we all do that for many comments (especially through voting) then the whole community benefits. I don’t realise when I get tone wrong. In this case I have been very slightly downvoted on both comments which is not usual for me - so your comment was an extra help.
- repox 4y ago
  > Please correctly blame the ecosystem that you dislike, instead of thoughtlessly using a language as a label for an ecosystem. While I understand your point, I can't help but feel like the two are connected. I _do_ have some beefs with the language itself, though. The export syntax concept is awful, the overly flexible type system to which I still haven't seen the point with and of course the whole thing needs to be transpiled to actually run. Minor annoyances, sure. Easily to blame my abilities and capabilities as the reason for not understanding and enjoying TypeScript. But the ecosystem really hits the nail and by working with TypeScript on a daily basis, I'm forced to interact with it. The developer community is so fragmented to anything else I’ve experienced. Granted, I don’t know every language and their respective communities, but the whole NodeJS/TypeScript community seems to have no common direction whether it comes to dependency managers, coding styles, transpilers, bundlers or much about any other “best practice” paradigms. And this also something that is pestering packages and the maintainers. I don’t experience this vast amount of fragmentation in PHP, Python, Kotlin or Dart. Whenever you reach out to the community, you’re rarely met with more opinions than you have fingers and toes; sure - not all agree on everything, but there’s more often than not, a sense of consensus on what a common approach to any given problem could be. While I of course could just have been very unlucky for the past two years, the community is the main (but not the only) reason I will not work with anything related to TypeScript or NodeJS ever again.
  - hither_shores 4y ago
    > I can't help but feel like the two are connected. I _do_ have some beefs with the language itself, though. The export syntax concept is awful, the overly flexible type system to which I still haven't seen the point with and of course the whole thing needs to be transpiled to actually run. They are connected, but almost exclusively in the JS -> TS direction: typescript imports are javascript imports, the type system is messy because javascript is messy (whether complete compatibility with javascript was a good goal is another question...), etc. > But the whole NodeJS/TypeScript community seems to have no common direction whether it comes to dependency managers, coding styles, transpilers, bundlers or much about any other “best practice” paradigms. Yep.
- nextaccountic 4y ago
  The developer experience must be evaluated holistically, because languages don't exist in a vacuum. The JS tooling, libraries and community absolutely impacts on how it feels like to be a Typescript developer. The Kotlin situation isn't comparable because there is an established community that uses Kotlin in the backend, without using Android. But perhaps you could compare with Swift: while Swift may technically run on non-Apple systems, that's not the experience of most developers. So it's totally valid to avoid Swift because you don't want to deal with Apple and Xcode.
phphphphp 4y ago
Yeah — TypeScript is great in a vacuum, and if you’re working on an established project that’s got all the tooling configured perfectly it can be a pleasure… but if you’re starting from the ground up, it can be a god awful nightmare. I think typescript is great but the heavy, heavy dependency on starter kits that come with a dozen build dependencies configured to within an inch of their life is a testimony to how much of TypeScript is voodoo. Every dependency you add to a project requires new incantations and prayers and probably some sort of sacrifice.
eyelidlessness 4y ago
If it’s just the tooling that makes you dislike it, the tooling is just as frustrating if you write plain JS. If you don’t have specific gripes with the TypeScript syntax and type system as such, I’d suggest trying just using it without any additional tooling (typescript as a dev dependency, tsc as the only build step) in a project amenable to that. The biggest downside is slower iteration when tsc itself is slow. But you don’t actually need all of the tooling complexity if that’s what you don’t like.
- Huh1337 4y ago
  Use swc to compile TypeScript. It doesn't typecheck (use tsc in your IDE for that) but the iteration speed is insane.
cercatrova 4y ago
Use Deno. Everything including writing and building TS is built in.

by repox 4y ago

rroot 4y ago

Typescript itself is fine. But yes, if you are using 3rd party libraries and frameworks with typescript, you might wonder if it's too late to change career and become a monk.

int_19h 4y ago

You're describing issues with the underlying JS ecosystem. TS builds on that, and while it can paper over the language deficiencies, the libraries and frameworks are down to the larger community with its culture of constant churn.

robocat 4y ago

That is the same as saying you hate Kotlin because Android annoys you. Or blaming JavaScript for the browser DOM. Please correctly blame the ecosystem that you dislike, instead of thoughtlessly using a language as a label for an ecosystem.

eyelidlessness 4y ago
It’s my impression GP doesn’t have a clear picture of where TypeScript ends and the rest of the tooling ecosystem begins. Which is totally understandable, especially given how pervasive TypeScript is and how it nearly totally overlaps with the rest. I think you and I have similar perspectives on the details, but you could be kinder expressing them.
- robocat 4y ago
  I assumed repox prefers bluntness, due to their writing style. I was careful with the words and tone that I chose. Checking comment history, repox wrote that they are a Dane (which I didn't know). My experience of friends from other nearby countries is that their style of interaction can be seen as rude by many people. In particular my stereotype is that Americans often prefer a more gentle approach. I think you are assuming I am not being respectful. However I believe that a blunt reply is definitely showing respect to them in this situation. I do need to be careful not to make comments that are personal attacks (or that could be mistaken for), which I certainly was not trying to do. (To quote you: "you’re making the claim, you defend it. Otherwise the assumption is just, like, your opinion man." ;) Hopefully repox can reply, although they don't often comment, so I would guess they are unlikely to check replies. Anyways, definitely off topic!
  - eyelidlessness 4y ago
    Hey, I mistake appropriateness of being blunt too. I’m autistic, so. I’m kind of impressed you dug through my recent comment history, even if the quote feels misplaced. Anyway feel free to be blunt with me, if you recognize me around. But I’ll also be blunt when I notice a critique is probably misplaced.
    - robocat 4y ago
      All good. To explain: I quickly scanned some of their recent comments to see if my assumptions could be wrong. When I noticed they were Danish, I then wondered if you were American, so I used hn.algolia.com to scan your comments for “American” as a keyword. You said you were, but at that point I luckily noticed the comment of yours that I quoted, which I just couldn’t resist cheekily passing back to you, because it fitted the discussion on comment quality at a meta level</smirk>. I often write personal notes like this after the topic has dropped from the front page. If there are a lot of people still reading the comment threads, I try harder to not be a distraction to others and I try to keep on topic. I really do appreciate your effort to keep my comment quality high - if we all do that for many comments (especially through voting) then the whole community benefits. I don’t realise when I get tone wrong. In this case I have been very slightly downvoted on both comments which is not usual for me - so your comment was an extra help.
repox 4y ago
> Please correctly blame the ecosystem that you dislike, instead of thoughtlessly using a language as a label for an ecosystem. While I understand your point, I can't help but feel like the two are connected. I _do_ have some beefs with the language itself, though. The export syntax concept is awful, the overly flexible type system to which I still haven't seen the point with and of course the whole thing needs to be transpiled to actually run. Minor annoyances, sure. Easily to blame my abilities and capabilities as the reason for not understanding and enjoying TypeScript. But the ecosystem really hits the nail and by working with TypeScript on a daily basis, I'm forced to interact with it. The developer community is so fragmented to anything else I’ve experienced. Granted, I don’t know every language and their respective communities, but the whole NodeJS/TypeScript community seems to have no common direction whether it comes to dependency managers, coding styles, transpilers, bundlers or much about any other “best practice” paradigms. And this also something that is pestering packages and the maintainers. I don’t experience this vast amount of fragmentation in PHP, Python, Kotlin or Dart. Whenever you reach out to the community, you’re rarely met with more opinions than you have fingers and toes; sure - not all agree on everything, but there’s more often than not, a sense of consensus on what a common approach to any given problem could be. While I of course could just have been very unlucky for the past two years, the community is the main (but not the only) reason I will not work with anything related to TypeScript or NodeJS ever again.
- hither_shores 4y ago
  > I can't help but feel like the two are connected. I _do_ have some beefs with the language itself, though. The export syntax concept is awful, the overly flexible type system to which I still haven't seen the point with and of course the whole thing needs to be transpiled to actually run. They are connected, but almost exclusively in the JS -> TS direction: typescript imports are javascript imports, the type system is messy because javascript is messy (whether complete compatibility with javascript was a good goal is another question...), etc. > But the whole NodeJS/TypeScript community seems to have no common direction whether it comes to dependency managers, coding styles, transpilers, bundlers or much about any other “best practice” paradigms. Yep.
nextaccountic 4y ago
The developer experience must be evaluated holistically, because languages don't exist in a vacuum. The JS tooling, libraries and community absolutely impacts on how it feels like to be a Typescript developer. The Kotlin situation isn't comparable because there is an established community that uses Kotlin in the backend, without using Android. But perhaps you could compare with Swift: while Swift may technically run on non-Apple systems, that's not the experience of most developers. So it's totally valid to avoid Swift because you don't want to deal with Apple and Xcode.

phphphphp 4y ago

Yeah — TypeScript is great in a vacuum, and if you’re working on an established project that’s got all the tooling configured perfectly it can be a pleasure… but if you’re starting from the ground up, it can be a god awful nightmare. I think typescript is great but the heavy, heavy dependency on starter kits that come with a dozen build dependencies configured to within an inch of their life is a testimony to how much of TypeScript is voodoo. Every dependency you add to a project requires new incantations and prayers and probably some sort of sacrifice.

eyelidlessness 4y ago

If it’s just the tooling that makes you dislike it, the tooling is just as frustrating if you write plain JS. If you don’t have specific gripes with the TypeScript syntax and type system as such, I’d suggest trying just using it without any additional tooling (typescript as a dev dependency, tsc as the only build step) in a project amenable to that. The biggest downside is slower iteration when tsc itself is slow. But you don’t actually need all of the tooling complexity if that’s what you don’t like.

Huh1337 4y ago
Use swc to compile TypeScript. It doesn't typecheck (use tsc in your IDE for that) but the iteration speed is insane.

cercatrova 4y ago

Use Deno. Everything including writing and building TS is built in.