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by steve_adams_86 69 days ago
Why do you think it sucks?

I used to dislike JavaScript a lot after learning it and PHP, then using languages like C#. Then TypeScript came along making JS much easier to live with, but has actually become quite nice in some ways.

If you use deno as your default runtime, it's almost Go-like in its simplicity when you don't need much. Simple scripts, piping commands into the REPL, built-in linting, testing, etc. It's not that bad!

Of course you're welcome to your opinion and we'd likely agree about a lot of what's wrong with it, but I guess I feel a bit more optimistic about TS lately. The runtime is improving, they've got great plans for it, it's actually happening, and LLMs aren't bad at using it either. It's a decent default for me.
2 comments
PUSH_AX 69 days ago
Not OP, I use TS but only because it’s the only option. TS is a build your own typing sandbox, more than enough rope to hang yourself.

Coming from typing systems that are opinionated, first class citizens of their languages, it doesn’t stand up.

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steve_adams_86 69 days ago
This is one of my dislikes as well.

You look at libraries like Effect, and it's genuinely incredible work, but you can't help feeling like... Man, so many languages partially address these problems with first-class primitives and control flow tooling.

I'm grateful for their work and it's an awesome project, but it's a clear reflection of the deficiencies in the language and runtime.

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newspaper1 69 days ago
I think it sucks because it transpiles to JavaScript and is an interpreted language. Users have to resolve the dependencies themselves and have the correct runtime. I definitely prefer my CLI tools be written in a compiled language with a single binary.
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steve_adams_86 69 days ago
I agree, though one cool thing arriving lately (albeit with some major shortcomings) is the ability to compile binaries with deno or bun (and nodejs experimentally, I think).

With Go you can compile binaries with bindings for other binaries, like duckdb or sqlite or so on. With deno or bun, you're out of luck. It's such a drag. Regardless, it's been quite useful at my work to be able to send CLI utilities around and know they'll 'just work'. I maintain a few for scientific data processing and gardening (parsing, analysis, cleaning, etc) which is why the lack of duckdb bundling is such a thorn. I do wish I could use Go instead and pack everything directly into the binary.

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r_lee 69 days ago
you can already "compile" TS binaries with deno, but it'll include the runtime in it and etc. so it'll take some disk space but I think these days it's less of a concern than before
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steve_adams_86 68 days ago
Totally, it's inconsequential for our use cases.

I think the binaries wind up being somewhere around 70mb. That's insane, but these are disposable tools and the cost is negligible in practice.

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