[jondubois]

>> I've setup a complete modern JavaScript tool setup and setting up TypeScript is by far the easiest part of that.

I see what you mean. Maybe that is the root of the problem and the reason for TypeScript's increasing popularity. The fact that the author of the article mentioned Flow also suggests that there is a similar effect at play in his case; devs get used to the build step and since they're already spending time building JS, they might as well start building TS.

I hate bundling during development so I'm not used to waiting around when debugging. Unfortunately, most modern front-end coding approaches depend on having a bundling step during development. I guess front end development is in a bad state right now. I tried VueJS a few months ago and I was shocked at how difficult it was to find information on how to use it without the bundling step. I was able to figure it out eventually and it turned out to be a very nice framework but the information necessary to get that ideal setup was just not there.

[zbentley]

I'm not a fan of bundling/packing obsession either, but I've come to recognize its necessity, at least at present. If you want to use any external libraries in a reliable way, or don't want to serve massive, incompatible-with-some-browsers JS files, I just don't think there's currently a way around using some sort of bundler (or, alternatively, paying the cost in slowed-down development and/or stacks of compatibility-related annoyances based on the "modern"-ness of any code you write or import). For tiny projects you may not need one, but beyond that the convenience benefits are just too great.

Every time I've tried to avoid using a bundler in development, I've either regretted it (babel/webpack/whatnot has screwed something up in prod that I didn't catch in dev), or ended up shoving the important parts of a bundler into browser plugins that roughly execute the bits of the build phase I care about in the browser when the page loads.

[wvenable]

I feel you. I've just starting a project from scratch using modern JS development stack including TypeScript. I've previously just done by JS without any tooling at all (besides an IDE). And I have used TypeScript stand-alone without the rest of JS bundling infrastructure.

I also used to do more dynamic back-end development (PHP) but a long time now my backend work has been C#.

The future of JavaScript, probably the future of web development in general, is with a compilation/build step. Having a fully dynamic uncompiled front-end and back-end code was probably just temporary blimp. The tooling, though, already understands your concerns and has plenty of features for editing and running without noticing the build step. I could configure the TS build environment to re-load scripts on edit and I don't even have to press refresh in the browser to see the effects.

It does all feel very heavily and complicated but sometimes I have to wonder if that's just me.