Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by seattle_spring 704 days ago
Exactly my sentiment. The only people I've met who are anti-TS are one of the following:

* Extremely opinionated people that are difficult to work with.

* Engineers who have only worked on smaller projects or codebases, and therefore haven't seen firsthand the real benefits of a typed codebase

* Non-FE engineers who just generally hate all JS-related stuff, and frequently opine that FE engineers aren't real engineers and have to re-learn the "latest fad framework" every year.

If I am interviewing someone and they start (likely unprompted) ragging on Typescript, there's a 95% chance one or more of the above bullet points describes them. Safer to move on to another candidate rather than take the chance that they're the other 5%.

2 comments

I'm a senior dev who works on an app you've almost certainly used. Some of us just think the overhead of typescript is silly when you have react propTypes and whatnot.

In general, I'm an alpinist. Bring only what you need.

Indeed. If I were interviewing a candidate like OP who starts ragging on TypeScript, I'd move them immediately into the "do not hire" pile. What you do in your own time programming-wise is vastly different to what you need to do working in an enterprise with many others.
The above experience is production experience where the decision to use JSDocs allowed us to focus on features over a TS rewrite, maintaining two codebases for multiple years with that strategy whilst vastly improving the type safety and documentation - from no types to full coverage and validation on the backend.

And prior to my current role I've used TS in production too.

Your response is exactly the sort of snap decision that I might have experienced.

And it's one that I find confusing in light of passion for type safety and type checking.

TypeScript is also incrementally adoptable, not sure how you were able to add JSDoc comments for types to a function for example while also being unable to convert that same function to TypeScript. JSDoc is strictly less powerful than TypeScript in general. For example, more complex types as well as template literal types are impossible to have in JSDoc. It is simply more ergonomic to use TypeScript instead of JSDoc, and therefore, I stand by my snap decision.
Agree on all points.