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by sombremesa 1949 days ago
The problem is that Typescript seems amazing when you're first starting out, and is especially appealing to devs coming from strongly typed languages - but, it's a productivity drag almost immediately (for seasoned JS devs), and as the software gets more complex you either get more and more type spaghetti or devs who spend days figuring out just how they're going to make that one type elegant.

All this to maybe catch one or two bugs, since the boogeyman of accidental type abuse rarely makes an appearance.

Some of the sacrifices made to turn it into a superset of vanilla JS come back to bite it as well. I think banning it from projects is a very wise move, but it's the kind of wisdom that's counter-intuitive and requires more of a business sense of things.
2 comments
yladiz 1949 days ago
> All this to maybe catch one or two bugs

I think you’re significantly underestimating the bugs that could be trivially caught with types. For example, Airbnb stated a while ago that 38% of their bugs could have been prevented with TypeScript[1]. Types aren’t the solution to all bugs - this is why we have strong test cases as well - but they bring a lot of benefit, especially if done with diligence, not just to prevent bugs but about to aid in understanding the system as a whole (seeing the types of an object can make it much easier to understand what data is being passed around).

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19131272

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sombremesa 1949 days ago
Postmortems like this are highly suspicious. There are many, many questions such as whether these bugs could've been caught simply via linting, and whether whoever did this research engaged in p-hacking.

I could not find a single paper - the only reference is a slide in a presentation that may well have been pulled out of someone's ass.

Anyway, I do concede that typing has its value, but in a large project, the cons ironically outweigh the pros (for TS specifically). I'm sure other JS typing systems are actually better at that, especially the ones that aren't trying to be JS supersets.

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selfmodruntime 1949 days ago
Given that AirBnB supplies one of THE strictest ESLint / TSLint configs, I'd wager they were using linting alright.
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presentation 1949 days ago
I don’t know about your experience but TypeScript has saved my team an enormous amount of time and resulted in the near complete elimination of showstopping bugs on deploy at my company. We’ve had maybe one fire in two years of rapid growth and a large part of that is thanks to TypeScript.
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