| I have a love hate relationship with Typescript. I have come to see it as a tool and to use it when it makes sense and avoid it when it doesn't. I like the language at a conceptual level and find what it does very useful. The syntax I find less than desirable (especially nested generics). For smaller projects I tend to use just JS because it's faster if I just want to prototype an idea and I'm not planning on keeping the code around for long. Where Typescript shines is when working with a team on longer term projects. The generic syntax gets derives from C++ which I don't think is a very good syntax. When dealing with more complex generic type declarations with nested generics / types your eye is scanning back and forth trying to match angle brackets and it is really hard to parse visually. Other languages like Haskell allow you to just read the "generics" left to right. Aliasing the type helps to some degree. The other thing I don't like is when you are experimenting and fleshing out an idea you want to take a try it and see approach but with Typescript you have to really commit even though you just want to experiment. When you want to change something there is so much more code that you have to change. The pros are when dealing with code you wrote in the past and forgot about what the types / parameters are or when dealing with code written by other people. Having the IDE suggest what you need to pass it is amazing. The contrast to that is having to jump to a function to see what POJO style object it will return, what the exact spelling of the property / key are, and things like that. Having static typing saves so much time when dealing with other code. If your project involves you working with others' code or code you wrote in the past and don't remember well then this is Typescript's sweet spot and it is a huge win. One of the things I find most lacking in Typescript is pattern matching. If you have strong static typing like Typescript does then pattern matching pairs really well with that. It makes your code much more declarative and easier to read / write. |
I've seen this opinion before, and I don't understand it in the slightest.
Let's say you're modeling a "user". You might initially think that users should have a first & last name, so you write it this way. Then later on you realize that there's no point in this distinction, and some of your users from Indonesia don't even have separate first & last names, so you want to switch to a single name.
* With weak/no typing, you have search around for anything that matches the field names, and hope to God you didn't miss anything.
* With stronger typing you just change it let the compiler tell you all the places you need to fix up.