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?
Imo they’ll add typing to vanilla js, which will kill ts.
And the ts devs support this
And I’m sure Microsoft would be happy to not have to do it anymore. And I personally would much prefer an actual typing system rather than a glorified linter.
Tho I wonder if it will end up being like jQuery, in the sense that, by the time core jQuery features got added to vanilla js, jQuery had developed new features that validated its continued existence. Maybe TS will go further than what gets absorbed into JS and keep it alive.
Honestly, I’ve never used jQuery despite writing JS for over 10 years. Just because I hate the reliance on massive nebulous packages so many have. Especially when I looked into it years ago, so much of what I saw jQuery being used for was stuff that was extremely easy to implement yourself. How has it changed?
And also JS.
Well “kill” is perhaps a strong word but it definitely won’t be JS anymore at that point. The changes required to bake in strong type support would be radical.
That would be a great solution, because while I love Typescript, I hate compiled web code. One of the coolest things about the internet is that as it’s supposed to work, you can download the source code for any website you go to. It’s open source by design. I hate closed source websites and I hate compiled website code that helps close the source it’s quite a contradiction because typescript is awesome and I recognise that compilation is the only way to get it to run on our web infrastructure. So it would be great if we could just type JavaScript and solve the contradiction that way.
Doesn’t typescript compile to js anyways? Is it obfuscated?
It transpiles to js and there is some level of stripping for optimization yes.
It’s not intentionally obfuscated or minified. Generally it just strips out types and comments, but depending on how it’s configured, it will rewrite certain things to work in ES5. At my work our build process uses a separate minification and bundling step, which also serves to a obfuscate our proprietary code.
the can’t add proper typing without adding a compiler. Whatever they add will be closer to puthon’s type hints. I’ve had to write primary in python lately and type hints help very very slightly, and tools like pyright catch so many false errors due to lack of hints in libraries that we’re forced to add ignore statements on too many lines. I genuinely don’t understand how there can be so many languages and all of them be painful to use
What about kotlin?
yes I heard it’s great. Scala was one language where I didn’t constantly feel like getting hit in the head with a hammer and I’ve heard Kotlin has a similar experience. I’m not interested in Android development so I haven’t tried it
Kotlin isn’t just for Android; IMO unless you’re trying to do purely functional programming, it’s preferable to Scala for JVM work.
I have very minimal pain in Go
I’ve heard good things about it, looking forward to learning it (hopefully soon)
I was able to pick it up extremely quickly. Just basically looking at existing projects. Tbh, I don’t even know how I learned it.