6 ms·

I maintain that TypeScript is probably the best language you’ll be able to get paid to write.

by teaearlgraycold 1y ago

suprfnk 1y ago
C# pays fine
- mock-possum 1y ago
  If you like one, you’ll prolly like the other Hell you might even like ActionScript ;P
  - const_cast 1y ago
    C# is nominally typed, which, in practice, leads to safer code and less type gymnastics. Of course you can avoid the type gymnastics with "any", then you you're sacrificing safety.
  - DonHopkins 1y ago
    If you like TypeScript and C#, then you'll probably also like Delphi and Turbo Pascal! They were all written by the same guy, Anders Hejlsberg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19568681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19568681 "My favorite is always the billion dollar mistake of having null in the language. And since JavaScript has both null and undefined, it's the two billion dollar mistake." -Anders Hejlsberg "It is by far the most problematic part of language design. And it's a single value that -- ha ha ha ha -- that if only that wasn't there, imagine all the problems we wouldn't have, right? If type systems were designed that way. And some type systems are, and some type systems are getting there, but boy, trying to retrofit that on top of a type system that has null in the first place is quite an undertaking." -Anders Hejlsberg
    - oldsecondhand 1y ago
      Delphi has been dead for 10+ years. Nobody uses it except for a few legacy applications and licenses cost $1200+.
      - DonHopkins 1y ago
        You're kind of missing the point. Turbo Pascal has been dead for a lot longer. Or is it? The point is that TypeScript and C# are extremely similar for a good reason, not a coincidence, and that Anders Hejlsberg knows what the fuck he's doing and talking about, and has been implementing amazing groundbreaking well designed languages and IDEs for a very long time. Turbo Pascal was so great it flummoxed Bill Gates, so Microsoft sent a limo to recruit and hire Anders Hejlsberg from Borland, then he made Visual J++, Windows Foundation Classes, C#, and TypeScript. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal >Scott MacGregor of Microsoft said that Bill Gates "couldn't understand why our stuff was so slow" compared to Turbo Pascal. "He would bring in poor Greg Whitten [programming director of Microsoft languages] and yell at him for half an hour" because their company was unable to defeat Kahn's small startup, MacGregor recalled. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8664370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8664370 >"According to the suit, Microsoft also offered Mr. Hejlsberg a $1.5 million signing bonus, a base salary of $150,000 to $200,000 and options for 75,000 shares of Microsoft stock. After Borland's counteroffer last October, Microsoft offered another $1.5 million bonus, the complaint says."
    - dotancohen 1y ago
      > "My favorite is always the billion dollar mistake of having null in the language. And since JavaScript has both null and undefined, it's the two billion dollar mistake." > -Anders Hejlsberg Why can't all-1s be null? E.g. a small int goes from the range 0-255 to the range 0-254, but we get a really useful property with no out-of-band Nullable overhead. With signed ints it even leads to symmetric ranges in the negative and positive directions.
      - DonHopkins 1y ago
        The FORTH-83 standard changed FIG-FORTH's official value of TRUE from 1 to -1 so all its bits were set. That was a rough transition like Python 2=>3, but worth it. It also defined /MOD integer division to be floored (rounded towards -infinity instead of zero like FIG-FORTH), which was also a tough change but the right one, especially for graphics. https://python-history.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-pythons-integer-division-floors.html https://python-history.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-pythons-inte... https://forth-standard.org/standard/diff?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://forth-standard.org/standard/diff?utm_source=chatgpt.... https://atariwiki.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Converting+FIG-Forth+Programs+to+Forth-83&utm_source=chatgpt.com https://atariwiki.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Converting+FIG-Fort... >4. For various reasons the definition of all divide functions general effect is that quotients are floored instead of rounded toward zero. This should cause no problems for most pre-existing application software. The new divide functions are marginally slower than the old (a few machine cycles under most circumstances). The side-effects of the redefinition for floored divide can be counter-intuitive under some circumstances. For example, in FIG-Forth the operation -40 360 MOD >would return the obvious answer (-40) on the stack, while 83- Standard Forth will return the answer 320! >5. The true flag returned by all logical operations has been changed from the value 1 (in FIG-Forth) to the value -1 (in Forth-83, all bits set). If your code used the 0 or 1 returned by a comparison in an arithmetic operation, you will need to interpolate the operator ABS after the logical operator. This is a particularly difficult problem to look for in your source code. However, we feel that this mutation in the 83-Standard was beneficial as it allows the returned true/false value to be used as a mask for AND.
        dotancohen 1y ago
douglasisshiny 1y ago
Meh, I used to have that feeling, especially when discovering fp-ts and then effect (neither of which I've been paid to write), but after about four years, I'm tired of writing it period. The standard library for node is horrible; the ecosystem is okay but not great. And I don't even care for effect anymore. I also write go in my job and it's just okay, but the standard library is much better. I've been playing around with rust in my free time and like it. I think it's a good FP middle ground. Gleam also looks interesting. But to your point I imagine there aren't many jobs paying for rust and practically none for Gleam.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- teaearlgraycold 1y ago
  I’m personally strongly opposed to using any library that becomes a new primitive of my project. I’m fine with an intrusive framework, but never a fundamental change to how plain-old business logic is written. That means fp-ts is out. However stuff like JS’s Date can be replaced under these rules - these days perhaps with a Temporal polyfill.
- stephenlf 1y ago
  I believe Fly.io deploys some Gleam in prod. I tried playing with Gleam for a bit, but I got stuck trying to make the Actor Model make sense. It’s Gleam’s solution to mutable state, inherited from Erlang and the BEAM. It takes so much code just to emulate a simple, mutable Map. I liked Rust’s middle ground with `mut` in function defs.
soulofmischief 1y ago
I'd love to disagree, but every other language's ergonomics just seem so clunky or too magic, whereas with TS and the standard web APIs you have so much room to code how you see fit. Sure, I'd rather a LISP for purity but I'm a realist. If only Brandon Eich had really gotten his way, we'd have Scheme.
moomoo11 1y ago
Agree. While people argue and split hairs over X language is better than Y language (noobs if I’m being honest, even if they have 20 yr experience), one can ship actual products and make money using TS. It’s a good language that scales quite well to the point where you can then extract specific parts to more performant languages. 99.9% of people won’t have that problem, so I think they should just use TS and solve problems. Anyone else can be safely ignored and they can complain in the corner.
nialv7 1y ago
i was paid to write rust for a couple of years.
- cjbgkagh 1y ago
  Hence the 'probably'
- AceJohnny2 1y ago
  was it for blockchain stuff
  - nialv7 1y ago
    Actually nope :)
frizlab 1y ago
Swift is a bliss to write and easy to get paid to write it.
- wiseowise 1y ago
  Atrocious tooling.
  - agos 1y ago
    I love Swift as in the language, the syntax, the theory. I despise just as much its tooling that has led me to infuriating moments such as finding out that ternary operators where the cause for a ballooning compilation time.
- dsego 1y ago
  I feel differently, but I've only tried it briefly. It feels like an abomination that can't decide what it is and has just too much syntactic sugar.
t-writescode 1y ago
As of the last couple years, you're probably not wrong. Basically every open role right now requires TypeScript, Node, Next.JS, etc.
bspammer 1y ago
Kotlin and even modern Java are both preferable for me. There’s no shortage of JVM roles.
- teaearlgraycold 1y ago
  If your entire stack is using optionals then Java can be acceptable. It’s not a terrible language otherwise. Checked exceptions are a failure IMO because they only check for some types of errors.
andai 1y ago
People may forget what you did, but they'll remember how you made them feel. It's been years since I've used TS, but I remember it failing to solve about half the problems that I had with JS. I think they did the best they could given the constraints though. This article is a good example. TS can't fix the underlying APIs, standard library etc.
- teaearlgraycold 1y ago
  I wouldn’t blame TS for not fixing the JS standard library. It’s just a type system.
  - Atotalnoob 1y ago
    Normally, I would agree with you, but if you are going to say it’s the best language, then the criticism is fair. Best language would be the entire ecosystem, including standard library
    - teaearlgraycold 1y ago
      Yes, I just think you’ve got the wrong expectations if you say “TS failed to fix half of JS’s” problems.

I maintain that TypeScript is probably the best language you’ll be able to get paid to write.

suprfnk 1y ago

C# pays fine

mock-possum 1y ago
If you like one, you’ll prolly like the other Hell you might even like ActionScript ;P
- const_cast 1y ago
  C# is nominally typed, which, in practice, leads to safer code and less type gymnastics. Of course you can avoid the type gymnastics with "any", then you you're sacrificing safety.
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  If you like TypeScript and C#, then you'll probably also like Delphi and Turbo Pascal! They were all written by the same guy, Anders Hejlsberg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19568681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19568681 "My favorite is always the billion dollar mistake of having null in the language. And since JavaScript has both null and undefined, it's the two billion dollar mistake." -Anders Hejlsberg "It is by far the most problematic part of language design. And it's a single value that -- ha ha ha ha -- that if only that wasn't there, imagine all the problems we wouldn't have, right? If type systems were designed that way. And some type systems are, and some type systems are getting there, but boy, trying to retrofit that on top of a type system that has null in the first place is quite an undertaking." -Anders Hejlsberg
  - oldsecondhand 1y ago
    Delphi has been dead for 10+ years. Nobody uses it except for a few legacy applications and licenses cost $1200+.
    - DonHopkins 1y ago
      You're kind of missing the point. Turbo Pascal has been dead for a lot longer. Or is it? The point is that TypeScript and C# are extremely similar for a good reason, not a coincidence, and that Anders Hejlsberg knows what the fuck he's doing and talking about, and has been implementing amazing groundbreaking well designed languages and IDEs for a very long time. Turbo Pascal was so great it flummoxed Bill Gates, so Microsoft sent a limo to recruit and hire Anders Hejlsberg from Borland, then he made Visual J++, Windows Foundation Classes, C#, and TypeScript. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal >Scott MacGregor of Microsoft said that Bill Gates "couldn't understand why our stuff was so slow" compared to Turbo Pascal. "He would bring in poor Greg Whitten [programming director of Microsoft languages] and yell at him for half an hour" because their company was unable to defeat Kahn's small startup, MacGregor recalled. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8664370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8664370 >"According to the suit, Microsoft also offered Mr. Hejlsberg a $1.5 million signing bonus, a base salary of $150,000 to $200,000 and options for 75,000 shares of Microsoft stock. After Borland's counteroffer last October, Microsoft offered another $1.5 million bonus, the complaint says."
  - dotancohen 1y ago
    > "My favorite is always the billion dollar mistake of having null in the language. And since JavaScript has both null and undefined, it's the two billion dollar mistake." > -Anders Hejlsberg Why can't all-1s be null? E.g. a small int goes from the range 0-255 to the range 0-254, but we get a really useful property with no out-of-band Nullable overhead. With signed ints it even leads to symmetric ranges in the negative and positive directions.
    - DonHopkins 1y ago
      The FORTH-83 standard changed FIG-FORTH's official value of TRUE from 1 to -1 so all its bits were set. That was a rough transition like Python 2=>3, but worth it. It also defined /MOD integer division to be floored (rounded towards -infinity instead of zero like FIG-FORTH), which was also a tough change but the right one, especially for graphics. https://python-history.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-pythons-integer-division-floors.html https://python-history.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-pythons-inte... https://forth-standard.org/standard/diff?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://forth-standard.org/standard/diff?utm_source=chatgpt.... https://atariwiki.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Converting+FIG-Forth+Programs+to+Forth-83&utm_source=chatgpt.com https://atariwiki.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Converting+FIG-Fort... >4. For various reasons the definition of all divide functions general effect is that quotients are floored instead of rounded toward zero. This should cause no problems for most pre-existing application software. The new divide functions are marginally slower than the old (a few machine cycles under most circumstances). The side-effects of the redefinition for floored divide can be counter-intuitive under some circumstances. For example, in FIG-Forth the operation -40 360 MOD >would return the obvious answer (-40) on the stack, while 83- Standard Forth will return the answer 320! >5. The true flag returned by all logical operations has been changed from the value 1 (in FIG-Forth) to the value -1 (in Forth-83, all bits set). If your code used the 0 or 1 returned by a comparison in an arithmetic operation, you will need to interpolate the operator ABS after the logical operator. This is a particularly difficult problem to look for in your source code. However, we feel that this mutation in the 83-Standard was beneficial as it allows the returned true/false value to be used as a mask for AND.
      - dotancohen 1y ago

douglasisshiny 1y ago

Meh, I used to have that feeling, especially when discovering fp-ts and then effect (neither of which I've been paid to write), but after about four years, I'm tired of writing it period. The standard library for node is horrible; the ecosystem is okay but not great. And I don't even care for effect anymore. I also write go in my job and it's just okay, but the standard library is much better. I've been playing around with rust in my free time and like it. I think it's a good FP middle ground. Gleam also looks interesting. But to your point I imagine there aren't many jobs paying for rust and practically none for Gleam.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
teaearlgraycold 1y ago
I’m personally strongly opposed to using any library that becomes a new primitive of my project. I’m fine with an intrusive framework, but never a fundamental change to how plain-old business logic is written. That means fp-ts is out. However stuff like JS’s Date can be replaced under these rules - these days perhaps with a Temporal polyfill.
stephenlf 1y ago
I believe Fly.io deploys some Gleam in prod. I tried playing with Gleam for a bit, but I got stuck trying to make the Actor Model make sense. It’s Gleam’s solution to mutable state, inherited from Erlang and the BEAM. It takes so much code just to emulate a simple, mutable Map. I liked Rust’s middle ground with `mut` in function defs.

soulofmischief 1y ago

I'd love to disagree, but every other language's ergonomics just seem so clunky or too magic, whereas with TS and the standard web APIs you have so much room to code how you see fit. Sure, I'd rather a LISP for purity but I'm a realist. If only Brandon Eich had really gotten his way, we'd have Scheme.

moomoo11 1y ago

Agree. While people argue and split hairs over X language is better than Y language (noobs if I’m being honest, even if they have 20 yr experience), one can ship actual products and make money using TS. It’s a good language that scales quite well to the point where you can then extract specific parts to more performant languages. 99.9% of people won’t have that problem, so I think they should just use TS and solve problems. Anyone else can be safely ignored and they can complain in the corner.

nialv7 1y ago

i was paid to write rust for a couple of years.

cjbgkagh 1y ago
Hence the 'probably'
AceJohnny2 1y ago
was it for blockchain stuff
- nialv7 1y ago
  Actually nope :)

frizlab 1y ago

Swift is a bliss to write and easy to get paid to write it.

wiseowise 1y ago
Atrocious tooling.
- agos 1y ago
  I love Swift as in the language, the syntax, the theory. I despise just as much its tooling that has led me to infuriating moments such as finding out that ternary operators where the cause for a ballooning compilation time.
dsego 1y ago
I feel differently, but I've only tried it briefly. It feels like an abomination that can't decide what it is and has just too much syntactic sugar.

t-writescode 1y ago

As of the last couple years, you're probably not wrong. Basically every open role right now requires TypeScript, Node, Next.JS, etc.

bspammer 1y ago

Kotlin and even modern Java are both preferable for me. There’s no shortage of JVM roles.

teaearlgraycold 1y ago
If your entire stack is using optionals then Java can be acceptable. It’s not a terrible language otherwise. Checked exceptions are a failure IMO because they only check for some types of errors.

andai 1y ago

People may forget what you did, but they'll remember how you made them feel. It's been years since I've used TS, but I remember it failing to solve about half the problems that I had with JS. I think they did the best they could given the constraints though. This article is a good example. TS can't fix the underlying APIs, standard library etc.

teaearlgraycold 1y ago
I wouldn’t blame TS for not fixing the JS standard library. It’s just a type system.
- Atotalnoob 1y ago
  Normally, I would agree with you, but if you are going to say it’s the best language, then the criticism is fair. Best language would be the entire ecosystem, including standard library
  - teaearlgraycold 1y ago
    Yes, I just think you’ve got the wrong expectations if you say “TS failed to fix half of JS’s” problems.