| > It’s a tool that has very few downsides and that improves nearly every single line of code you write. Sometimes I just don't feel like dealing with those very few downsides though, but I can accept it's mostly personal preference. At my age, sometimes I just don't want to deal with: 1. Yet another configuration file (tsconfig.json in this case). When something breaks, having one more place to look at is not something I want. The more extra files like this are needed for the development environment to even work (as in, something undesirable happens if you remove them), the less confidence I have in the project's long term reliability/stability. 2. That same configuration has misleading naming. The `"strict": true` setting should be called `"recommended": true`, or at least `"preset": "recommended"`, because it's not even strict. I would expect this `strict` flag to enable everything to the most restrictive way possible, and let devs disable checks (if) they don't want them. In its current state it doesn't enable strict checks like `noFallthroughCasesInSwitch`, `noImplicitOverride`, `noImplicitReturns`, `noUncheckedIndexedAccess`, `noUnusedLocals`, `noUnusedParameters` (I might be missing more). 3. Related to previous point: Inconsistencies between projects. So I work on one project with strict settings, tsc properly mentions possibly undefined accesses, etc; and then I move to a different project, and if I forget to context switch ("TypeScript config is different here"), I could be accidentally trusting the compiler to keep undefined accesses (and other stuff) in check, when it's not actually doing so. 4. Last time I checked, I couldn't just have a git repo "foolib" that is 100% TypeScript (100% .ts files, zero .js files), and `npm install` that repo on a separate project, and have it Just Work™. There's always extra steps that need to be done if you want to use .ts files from a separate package (usually compile to .js and install that; or using a bundler (read first point again)). 5. Why does the "!" operator even exist (or at least, why isn't there a flag to forbid it (for example the strict flag)). In my experience, using it is just developer laziness, where someone just doesn't want to write proper checks because "it's noise". --- Those 5 points came off the top of my head so I'm almost certainly forgetting stuff. It's mostly "death by a thousand cuts" kind of stuff, so sometimes I might not mind, but other times I might not be in the mood to deal with this and heavily influences my decision to go with TypeScript (keeping it approachable to as many people as possible) or a different language/ecosystem altogether. Yes, I could "just" write a package that I can just npm install and it autoconfigures TypeScript and other stuff for me (and I have done so, for my own sanity). But I shouldn't need to do that, and it's too brittle for my taste. |