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I have been building web apps for long enough to remember when it was commonplace to SSH (or Telnet!) into the server and just vim index.php. As you can imagine, it was pretty easy to bring the site down like that, so we started doing what is now called Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment: automated tests as a precondition for deployment. Later, we adopted static analysis tools and code linters. This helped, but only so much could be done with the dynamically typed languages which were popular in the early internet. As a self-taught programmer with no college degree, I started with dynamic languages: Perl, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby. I viewed the statically typed languages (and the programmers who could wield them) with reverence and awe. C, C++, Java, these were “real” languages that required big brains, and I should stay in my dynamically typed playpen. But as I matured, my understanding shifted: dynamic languages require hubris, require belief that you can keep an entire complicated codebase in your head with perfect recall. Statically typed languages, it turns out, invite humility. With a static type system, each step in a program’s lifecycle can be a little contract with itself. Break that contract and the language will tell you exactly how and where. These languages can provide immediate feedback to the developer about a program’s correctness before it is even run. Bridging the gap between all of the existing dynamic code (and the developers who wrote it) and the statically typed utopia lies so-called gradual type systems such as TypeScript. I like to use a meteorological analogy here: if JavaScript is “wintry mix,” then TypeScript lowers the temperature just enough to build a snowman. |