I have a lot of "framework free" single-developer projects as well (such as https://bongo.to ), but that isn't really what I think we are talking about here. Single developer projects can do whatever they want, it isn't a problem. The problem comes when you have to work with distributed teams, juniors, etc. One way or another a large team still has to come to agreements about how to do things, and without an external reference it will have to be made up in an ad-hoc manner instead. This often leads to issues, many of us have noticed.
The claim upthread was that you couldn't make a web app at all without a framework ("or it would just be a document"). I said yes you can and the goalposts shifted to: sure, but only "brochure-ware" (referring to simple unambitious projects). I show an ambitious interactive project made without a framework and now the goalposts are moving to: sure, but large distributed teams couldn't work like this? You know, this solo project is more ambitious than 99% of the projects I work on at my actual work. You know, projects that have 10, 40, or 100 devs working on it.
I absoluetly agree with your sentiment, and furthermore in projects as large and mature as mine, with 500K LOC (about maybe 30% in TypeScript) lots of times I simply cannot remember enough about my code to effectively refactor it from memory without type safety (to check me) and IDE refactoring to DO the refactoring.
I mean if I need to change a variable name in a class or something, unless it's a perfectly unique name (easily searchable), it would take me hours to do in JS what I can do in 4 seconds with TypeScript.
Even if you know of massive projects in JS, the problem isn't that they cannot exist, it's that maintaining them takes 100x the manpower it would in TypeScript.
Yes it is. App.js is all the code there is. You can't count the two other files with 10 lines each. lol. Let's be honest here.
And yeah for a tiny toy project like this you can get away with having zero design, zero architecture, zero object models, zero classes, and sure since everything is zero, we can throw in "Zero TypeScript" and "Zero Frameworks". Looks like some high-schooler's first ever coding project.
There's literally only 4 JS files in the whole repo and you couldn't be bothered to check how much code they have? Even after I told the other guy who made the same false claim "no, it's not a single file codebase"?
Jesus you people are insufferable. So obnoxiously confident while being wrong about easily verifiable facts.
> tiny toy project
Huh? 99% of web development is about rendering text and images. This project is moving your mouse inside a web browser & provides a plausible chat experience without a language model. That's more ambitious than just about any actual work project I've seen.
Even considering chatbot.js, it's still a small enough toy project to just barely get by without type safety. I don't consider a project "large" until it's in the 30K to 50K LOC at least, where it becomes impossible to literally remember where each use of any given variable is. Type Safety catches most typos at build time, and also allows ease of refactoring. Only these small projects can get by without type safety, but EVEN the small projects DO benefit from catching errors at build time. It's just a self-foot-shoot to find bugs at runtime instead of build time.
The question in this thread is not TypeScript vs JavaScript. It's framework vs no-framework. Specifically, is it possible - possible at all - to create an interactive web app without frameworks - one that isn't "just a document" or "brochure-ware". I've demonstrated pretty clearly that yes it is possible. You people just keep shifting the goalposts further and further... Now it doesn't count unless it's 50K LoC? As if unnecessary complexity was some kind of inherent good.