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Is TypeScript a fad or is my manager delusional? (feddit.dk)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/programming

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I was talking to my manager the other day, discussing the languages we are using at $dayjob. He kind of offhandedly said that he thinks TypeScript is a temporary fad and soon everything will go back to using JavaScript. He doesn't like that it's made by Microsoft either.

I'm not a frontend developer so I don't really know, but my general impression is that everything is moving more and more towards TypeScript, not away from it. But maybe I'm wrong?

Does anyone who actually works with TypeScript have any impression about this?

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 5 months ago (2 children)

A fad? No, definitely not. TypeScript brings features (and structure) that will /should probably make their way into JS.

It's sort of like asking, "does SASS replace CSS" or "is liquid the next HTML?" They're just implementations of features FE developers want in the core spec of JS, CSS, and HTML.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago (1 children)

that will /should probably make their way into JS.

Not really, IMHO. The main advantage of TS is that it will help you catch errors without having to run a particular piece of code - i.e. you won't have to move to the third page of some multi-page form to discover a particular bug. In other words, it helps you catch bugs before your code even reaches your browser, so it doesn't bring you much to have them in the browser.

(There is a proposal to allow running TS in the browser, which would be nice, but you'd still run a type checker separately to actually catch the bugs.)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I think the important part is that the syntax will become standardised, rather than being defined by microsoft/typescript, potentially allowing for alternative implementations. It could also make the build step optional in some cases, which is something people dislike about typescript currently.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

I think the syntax explicitly won't get standardised - but the places where syntax can be put will be (e.g. after a : following a variable, before the =). With, yes, the goal of eliminating the build step, but the type checker (which really is just a linter at this point) would still be able to define their own specific syntax. I don't think it could work any other way either, anyway.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Hoping this is true. The biggest annoyance with typescript is needing some kind of compiler. Haven't used Bun or Deno very much, both of which natively support TS, but there are still incompatibilities with the way Node does things and how certain modules were built (CommonJS vs ESM). I like writing JavaScript but the tooling is utter crap.