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I had the privilege of maintaining a 6 language cross-platform library for a while and man does the Typescript stuff ring true. Dart was the best. Java without

I had the privilege of maintaining a 6 language cross-platform library for a while and man does the Typescript stuff ring true. Dart was the best. Java without the Enterprise JavaBeans Injection Factory Factory. Swift without the ObjC compat baggage and fundamental design flaws like the typechecker that can infinite loop and regularly takes 200 ms for methods. Kotlin without the slapdash IDE developer side-project language stuff, "here's 20 kinds of syntactic sugar and 10 methods that do the same thing. Use your favorite sugar/naming convention for convenience" The only ones I genuinely feared were TS and C++, C++ because a deep respect and fear of manual memory management. TS was just...weird, lot of half-baked stuff. I was having a true TS engineer do code reviews, and they had what should have been minor bike-shedding about constructor formatting. That broke parameter doc comments displaying on hover. All I could find was people pointing this out without answers, and TS reviewer was kinda busy, gave me stock answers and didn't grok there was a genuine issue. A week later, I finally found an issue explaining some long convoluted thing that made it impossible.

cogman10 3y ago
Yeah... TS is just a bit weird. Seems like the language design decisions have generally been "Why not" and not "how does this improve things?" That's lead to a really complex language ripe for abuse. C++ sort of suffers a similar problem though thankfully it's gotten way better (probably because it's old and not super appealing for less experienced devs). There's also healthy fear in C++ because, like you point out, misuse can lead to hard to find security holes. And I'm someone that prefers a more feature rich language in general. But I want that to mostly write boring code with the "neat" escape hatches to help when it makes things clearer.

cogman10 3y ago

Yeah... TS is just a bit weird. Seems like the language design decisions have generally been "Why not" and not "how does this improve things?" That's lead to a really complex language ripe for abuse. C++ sort of suffers a similar problem though thankfully it's gotten way better (probably because it's old and not super appealing for less experienced devs). There's also healthy fear in C++ because, like you point out, misuse can lead to hard to find security holes. And I'm someone that prefers a more feature rich language in general. But I want that to mostly write boring code with the "neat" escape hatches to help when it makes things clearer.