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There was no real competition, Flow was a practical internal tool with 0 marketing budget. Typescript is typical MS 3E strategy with a huge budget. Needless to

by sesm 2y ago

There was no real competition, Flow was a practical internal tool with 0 marketing budget. Typescript is typical MS 3E strategy with a huge budget. Needless to say, Flow is much more practical and less intrusive, but marketing budget captured all the newbie devs.

ignoramous 2y ago
> There was no real competition There was: Anders Hejlsberg and Lars Bak: TypeScript, JavaScript, and Dart https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AqbCQuK0gM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AqbCQuK0gM (2013). Summary: https://g.co/gemini/share/a60c3897bae1 https://g.co/gemini/share/a60c3897bae1 / https://archive.is/qJ1wA https://archive.is/qJ1wA
com2kid 2y ago
TypeScript was really really easy to get started with back in the day. It allows for incremental correctness, has good docs, and good tooling. On top of that a lot of beginner React tutorials started out with TypeScript, which onboarded a lot of new engineers to the TS ecosystem, and got them used to the niceties of TS (e.g. import syntax).
treflop 2y ago
Have to disagree. I tried Flow irrespective of marketing and didn’t think it was polished. Kept running into type situations that the language didn’t support well. Kept bugging out in my IDE. Had no elegance.
- spoiler 2y ago
  When I last used it, as a type system it was much better than TypeScript. A lot of flow features now exist in TypeScript though too. One big annoyance with Flow I had is like you said: unpolished tooling. Another was frequent breaking changes (I don't hold it against them too much, it was 0.x software after all) Also because features diverged, you had to maintain type defs for multiple versions of flow for for multiple library versions. And then at one point, they also decided to convert internal errors to any types instead of displaying the error. That was the last straw for me, especially since I maintained a few flow type defs. I spent _so_ much of _my_ time just on type def maintenance for open source libraries already, with the any decay I like flying blind too. So I just switched to TS with its interior type system: it was good enough and others maintained library typedefs for me. But now the type systems are much more closely aligned (unless flow drifted), so switching to TS paid off in the end.

by sesm 2y ago

ignoramous 2y ago

> There was no real competition There was: Anders Hejlsberg and Lars Bak: TypeScript, JavaScript, and Dart https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AqbCQuK0gM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AqbCQuK0gM (2013). Summary: https://g.co/gemini/share/a60c3897bae1 https://g.co/gemini/share/a60c3897bae1 / https://archive.is/qJ1wA https://archive.is/qJ1wA

com2kid 2y ago

TypeScript was really really easy to get started with back in the day. It allows for incremental correctness, has good docs, and good tooling. On top of that a lot of beginner React tutorials started out with TypeScript, which onboarded a lot of new engineers to the TS ecosystem, and got them used to the niceties of TS (e.g. import syntax).

treflop 2y ago

Have to disagree. I tried Flow irrespective of marketing and didn’t think it was polished. Kept running into type situations that the language didn’t support well. Kept bugging out in my IDE. Had no elegance.

spoiler 2y ago
When I last used it, as a type system it was much better than TypeScript. A lot of flow features now exist in TypeScript though too. One big annoyance with Flow I had is like you said: unpolished tooling. Another was frequent breaking changes (I don't hold it against them too much, it was 0.x software after all) Also because features diverged, you had to maintain type defs for multiple versions of flow for for multiple library versions. And then at one point, they also decided to convert internal errors to any types instead of displaying the error. That was the last straw for me, especially since I maintained a few flow type defs. I spent _so_ much of _my_ time just on type def maintenance for open source libraries already, with the any decay I like flying blind too. So I just switched to TS with its interior type system: it was good enough and others maintained library typedefs for me. But now the type systems are much more closely aligned (unless flow drifted), so switching to TS paid off in the end.