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Discussion on: TypeScript: JavaScript + Types = Awesome Developer Productivity

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qm3ster profile image
Mihail Malo

What do you think about the alleged "Cost of TypeScript"?

Personally, I think it's definitely a velocity improvement, both in legacy code and greenfield, because the main benefit is developer tooling and not release testing, unlike what that article focuses on.

Do you think this article is just capitalizing on the TypeScript hype?

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vintharas profile image
Jaime González García

I think it's great that people have different opinions and points of views. We're all the richer for it :D You need sceptics to keep us all honest and continue improving things.

I read the article a while back but I remember it had a couple of things that bugged me:

  1. It seems to present a false dichotomy which is TypeScript vs Code Reviews/TDD, etc. As if adopting TypeScript means letting go of great development practices like code reviews, TDD, automated testing, etc. TypeScript is just one tool more that makes you more productive in addition to all your current arsenal of tools and practices.
  2. It seems to equate the ease of use of TypeScript with other type inference tools like tern-js that are much harder to setup. TypeScript works out of the box. tern-js doesn't.

But as said, I read it a while back and I may have misunderstood him. I think that regardless of the costs, all in all, he seemed to have a good opinion of TypeScript. I think that a lot of the pain points that Eric is experiencing with TypeScript stem from the fact that he uses a very FP-like way of programming in JavaScript and TypeScript isn't as feature complete for specifying the types of FP constructs he favours like higher order functions, etc.