[diggan]

Off-topic, but I love how different programmers think about things, and how nothing really is "correct" or "incorrect". Started thinking about it because for me it's the opposite, JS is an OK and at least usable language, as long as you avoid TS and all that comes with it.

Still, even I who'd call myself a JavaScript developer also try to avoid desktop applications made with just JS :)

[Xelbair]

JS's issue is that it allows you to run an objectively wrong code without throwing explicit error to the user, it just fails silently or does something magical. Seems innocent, until you realize what we use JS for, other than silly websites or ERP dashboards.

It is full of gotchas that serves 0 purpose nowadays.

Also remember that it is basically a Lisp wearing Java skin on top, originally designed in less than 2 weeks.

Typescript is one of few things that puts safety barrier and sane static error checking that makes JS bearable to use - but it still has to fall down to how JS works in the end so it suffers from same core architectural problems.

[diggan]

> JS's issue is that it allows you to run an objectively wrong code without throwing explicit error to the user, it just fails silently or does something magical. Seems innocent, until you realize what we use JS for, other than silly websites or ERP dashboards.

What some people see as a fault, others see as a feature :) For me, that's there to prevent entire websites from breaking because some small widget in the bottom right corner breaks, for example. Rather than stopping the entire runtime, it just surfaces that error in the developer tools, but lets the rest to continue working.

Then of course entire web apps crash because one tiny error somewhere (remember seeing a blank page with just some short error text in black in the middle? Those), but that doesn't mean that's the best way of doing things.

> Also remember that it is basically a Lisp wearing Java skin on top

I guess that's why I like it better than TS, that tries to move it away from that. I mainly do Clojure development day-to-day, and static types hardly ever gives me more "safety" than other approaches do. But again, what I do isn't more "correct" than what anyone else does, it's largely based on "It's better for me to program this way".

[Xelbair]

>it's there to prevent entire websites from breaking because some small widget in the bottom right corner breaks, for example.

the issue is that it prevents that, but also allows you to send complete corrupt data forward, that can create horrible cascade of errors down the pipeline - because other components made assumption about correctness of data passed to them.

Such display errors should be caught early in development, should be tested, and should never reach prod, instead of being swept under the rug - for anything else other than prototype.

but i agree - going fully functional with dynamic types beats average JS experience any day. It is just piling up more mud upon giant mudball,

[joquarky]

IME, JSDoc is sufficient for type checking.

TS is just too much overhead for the marginal gains.

[eitland]

> JS is an OK and at least usable language, as long as you avoid TS and all that comes with it.

Care to explain why?

My view is this: since you can write plain JS inside TS (just misconfigure tsconfig badly enough), I honestly don’t see how you arrive at that conclusion.

I can just about understand preferring JS on the grounds that it runs without a compile step. But I’ve never seen a convincing explanation of why the language itself is supposedly better.