[dahwolf]

Typescript is divisive. People are passionate in loving it or hating it, not to forget a silent majority that never even tried it.

Typescript is totalitarian. It consumes you whole. It makes no sense to partially adapt it as its supposed benefits will then never materialize. The deeper you're in, the more motivated you'll get to go even deeper.

This is entirely opposite from writing unit tests. Everybody hates to do that, you'll never have coverage to match real world complexity and it easily breaks under time pressure. The more you try to get it to work, the more you hate it and just want to give up on it. Typescript is different, it has a point of no return.

That being said, we should check our passion. Tech discussions have a high degree of confirmation bias coming from a small very vocal minority. This same minority that would advance React, Tailwind, and similar choices as the one and only industry standard.

It's not representative of the wider developer community, most of which are silent. Nor is it representative of every use case one can build on the web, every project size, team size, etc.

As for DHH, it's an unsurprising move. He craves the simpler times we once knew, where web/front-end development wasn't such a hot mess. I think the general point has merit, as to whether the specific point of Typescript fits into that narrative, is debatable. Personally, I think project size/complexity and team size/skill levels are big factors.

[kstrauser]

> He craves the simpler times we once knew, where web/front-end development wasn't such a hot mess.

I strongly disagree. Web/front-end development was always a hot mess. It's just that when we were using Perl to write CGI.pm pages, we didn't have good tooling to tell us all the terrible things we were doing.

Modern tooling just shines a light on our mistakes. It didn't make them for us. Those simpler times only existed in the sense that we were blissfully ignorant of our sins.

[dahwolf]

I was looking at the bigger picture, and didn't clarify that point enough.

What I mean to say is that web development was more accessible during simpler times. People from all walks of life would develop websites, flash stuff, and even dynamic sites, i.e. LAMP. They could do that because it was simple enough to learn.

Front-end development as we typically do it today has turned into a hardcore engineering discipline of staggering complexity.

It is in fact so engineering-heavy that even within the world of professional front-end development it has caused a split where there's a "front of the front-end" (CSS, UX, accessibility) and a "back of the front-end" (the engineering part).

You may be able to justify every single tool, command line, pattern or best practice and it's not my point to talk you out of it. My point is to zoom out and consider this larger pattern.

[kstrauser]

Those are very fair points! You use to be able to write a credible site with a text editor and an FTP client, but that's a long time gone.

(Bystanders, don't "correct" me with "technically you still can...", etc. I know. It's all just text, right? But the parent poster is absolutely right about the general state of things.)

[dahwolf]

Thanks for a reasonable discussion.

Whilst hobbyists can still use whatever they want, including simple options, I in particular empathize with those new to the field or looking to turn a hobby into a job.

You need to know React/Typescript/CLIs/Docker/Git/Unit testing/IDEs/CSS/5 million other things. Or there's simply not going to be a job for you at all.

So "just don't use it" doesn't apply.

On the upside, once you do master the unwarranted complexity, pay is great. Fiddling around with toys and a Frankenstein tech stack whilst continuing to produce outcomes with worse UX than 15 years ago is somehow richly rewarded. It paid for my quality of life so let's add some more "absolutely essential" tools.