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?

  • SorteKaninOPA
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    9 months ago

    Can’t you just use try/catch blocks

    No, because what if whatever you’re calling is updated and suddenly it throws a new exception where before it didn’t? Python or JavaScript or other interpreted languages will never warn you about that.

    if the data structure of whatever you’re working with isn’t what you expected?

    That sounds like a whole lot of boilerplate I have to write to verify every time that something is what I expect. Static typing does that for me much easier and more reliably.

    Some languages like Rust have so good type systems that often when a program compiles, it just works. You don’t have to run the code to know that it functions if you only make a small change.

    What kind of systems have you worked in? In small systems, the static analysis doesn’t matter as much, but the benefits become bigger and bigger the more code there is to analyze.