Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by errantspark 1708 days ago
This is news to me, as far as I know it'll error out when it reads TS on the REPL. How do you enable this?
1 comments

Oh, in the console? Probably won't work? I'm saying that you can run chrome's debugger on source mapped TS files, which is really really nice for bug-hunting and developing locally

But I mean if the biggest complaint you have is that it doesn't run in a browsers REPL console, that feels pretty minor to me. You can easily find TS REPLs all over the web

Edit: if you are asking about chrome debugger, here's a link to some info https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43627243/using-chrome-to...

Right, but the actual benefit comes from having the REPL and the debugger in the same place. Plus the chrome REPL is fantastic, so suggesting I just use a different one is sorta like saying "you can just use your phone" when my default is a Hasselblad. When I'm writing JS/Node I can write code in the REPL in the context within which it will execute, it really cuts down on how much I have to hold in my head at one time because I can just ask the computer. It also makes exploring much much faster because my iteration times are as fast as the computer can run my code. I find it's a much more natural way of programming and about as close to SLIME as I can get while still writing in a language that has easy economic value.
Not sure if this solves 100% of your problems, but this seems like it could help a bit https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/typescript-console...

Also for me, the benefits of a statically typed language on a large team heavily outweighs not having TS in a chrome REPL. It's not even close. Maybe your use case is different, but for me it seems like you're missing the forest for the trees.

> benefits of a statically typed language on a large team

I mean yeah, sure, if you have to work on a large team in the browser/node you're going to have to make tradeoffs for that, and using TS seems like it'll help everyone go home at 5. I don't think I'm missing the forest for the trees, we're talking past each-other.

To illustrate a bit further, while I like Rust a lot, (the problems it tackles are MUCH more real than the ones TS does) and I put in the effort to learn and use it on a few personal projects I still find myself reaching for C almost universally these days. Even in the case of Rust's very useful tradeoffs I feel like they cost too much of my freedom, and TS' guarantees are much more surface level for a similar cost.