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Comment by tribby | Hacker News Reader

to save readers the time I've just wasted, here are the two sentences about typescript in this sales pitch for cycligent.js:

"I am able to keep the freedom and expressiveness of JavaScript to which I have become so accustomed while getting enterprise-level type checking and refactoring capabilities. Declaration of objects and interfaces is a dream."

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I think these reports from the field are worthwhile. The guy is an experienced programmer. I thought it was interesting that he was a hard core Java/C# and hated JavaScript when he had to use it. Then after a couple of years of JavaScript, he fell in love with the expressiveness and ease of coding and chaffed at the restrictions of Java/C#. Then he had to do a large app in JavaScript and hit the point where he it was really painful to refactor and he missed the tools he had in Java and C#. Finding TypeScript was, as Goldilocks said "just right." The tagline of TypeScript is "JavaScript that Scales" for exactly this reason. His journey mirrors mine and probably a lot of others.

I got there from thier other article "Does Electron live up to the hype?"

https://www.cycligent.com/blog/does-electron-live-up-to-the-...

tl;dr - It does

I am not associated with the company. I download and tried Cycligent to see how their Elecron app turned out (I'm a big fan of Electron.) It looks like a decent git client, although it feels like a web app with the dialogs that slide in. I could get used to it. Screen shot:

http://imgur.com/a/y5F5A

>I got there from thier other article "Does Electron live up to the hype?" tl;dr - It does

It creates applications that require at the very least three times as many resources as Qt, which is also a cross-platform tool-kit that allows you a lot of freedom (specially with QML) as well as native OS widgets using a single codebase (although probably compromising on the HIGs' patterns for each OS).

I fail to see how Electron lives up to its hype as a holy grail for cross-platform application development, unless my impression of the hype behind it is wrong.

It is just the second coming of Mozilla XUL, just that this generation hyping Electron was still on their diapers, so they haven't seen it coming and going away without living any trace of it besides Firefox and Thunderbird.

Can we have a rational discussion about web technologies without resorting to insults and ad hominem attacks on an entire "generation"?

Rational? This is a discussion about hating a language for silly reasons. They must let the hate out or they'll be bitter forever.

While there are plenty of things to be said about JavaScript and its ecosystem which I very much doubt you could dismiss as silly, this discussion is about Electron. Meaning, an entire browser runtime being shipped to power a simple desktop appliaction, for a small developer benefit over other cross-platform toolkits and to great detriment for the users.

And please, if you believe you are above those ad-hominem attacks, don't use them yourself.

Strange, the comment I was responding to was not about Electron, but web technologies.

And exactly where was my ad-hominem attack?

And thank God for the second coming! Jesus, it's about time.

Electron is much better than XUL along many dimensions.

At least it doesn't force you to use XML external entities in DTD files for text localization. [1]

You just call the Electron localization function! ;) [2]

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL/Tu...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_localization_function

Not for the user experience.

As someone who tried out XUL back when they released XULRunner, in 2006, I don't agree at all; XUL was this weird and poorly document XML language which you could only use for desktop apps (since no other browser besides Mozilla's supported it). Also, JS on browsers was much more limited back then, so code reuse between the site and the desktop app was much less useful.

Meanwhile, Electron and their ilk use all the standard web languages, and JS is nowadays used much more (including on servers), so the code reuse is now actually useful.

From the user experience point of view they are quite similar.

Back then I could usually guess when some "desktop" apps were written in XUL, given their performance or lacking OS integration.

Same thing now with Electron apps.

From what he wrote, he was writing Java and switched to JavaScript. C# got lambda expressions years before Java, if he wasn't using them, then yes, those languages are very restrictive.

They solved most of the expressiveness problems; at least for me. And Java only got them a year or two ago didn't it?

I use typescript a lot at the moment, I really miss it now when I have to write vanilla js, but it's still not a great language. You still have to think about 'this' a lot, 'this' still causes bugs, in many ways it's over verbose because every property and method call has to be prepended with 'this.'.

yes it's the same language. You don't have to use 'this', prototypes or classes a single time in your program. It's so much saner without all that crap.

I agree, if you ignore classes, prototypes and 'this', js makes for an excellent functional language.

What on Earth is "enterprise-level type checking"?

In enterprise software you do one extra type check.

Enterprise-level capabilities. I know the E-word is taboo here but aren't you people exaggerating a but on the trolling?

"Enterprise-level capabilities" doesn't mean anything still.

Google is bigger than most enterprises, and they don't use any "enterprisey" stuff, not even in their Java.

Oh come on, you're not even trying. He means, the type checking and refactoring capabilities that you want to have in a large team that relatively quickly changes composition. I.e. the kinds of teams you often find in enterprises.

I doubt Google doesn't use any of the type checking and refactoring tools that come with all Java IDEs out there. You think they rename Java methods with command-line search&replace just to stay in touch with their inner startup? Come on. They're an enterprise like any other and they use what the OP calls "enterprise-level type checking and refactoring capabilities".

I agree that it's a stupid name but I think you're misunderstanding on purpose.

>* Oh come on, you're not even trying. He means, the type checking and refactoring capabilities that you want to have in a large team that relatively quickly changes composition. I.e. the kinds of teams you often find in enterprises.*

I rarely find such large teams in enterprises.

What I usually find is ad-hoc projects, some in VB6, some targeting IE6 in 2016 still, others in J2EE with "enterprise" application servers, etc. Most done by 1 to half a dozen people. And I don't see them "quickly changing composition" -- the same persons work in the same IT deps for decades...

>I doubt Google doesn't use any of the type checking and refactoring tools that come with all Java IDEs out there. You think they rename Java methods with command-line search&replace just to stay in touch with their inner startup?

No, I mean there's nothing enterprisey about refactoring.

> the same persons work in the same IT deps for decades...

Guess I've found my solution to my persistent angst over the repeated 'old geeks are screwed' stories around here!

Well, of course. Old geeks are screwed on startups and startup-y companies.

The enterprise IT (and the financial sector, major organizations, etc) are the places where old geeks are quite ok -- if not to hire, surely to keep past 40 and 50 when they have already been working for you. The median age in an IT department in a large enterprise is much higher than in any SV startup.

Can people die from code written at Google?

Sure. E.g. flaw in Gmail exposes identities of harassed persons to their ex-spouses, etc.

Did you ever wrote Android or GWT code?

Android yes. It's a horrible mess. But I don't understand your point :-)

> they don't use any "enterprisey" stuff, not even in their Java.

It doesn't get more enterprisey than that.

Ah right, i misparsed HN's significant whitespace and thought you were responding to me. Agree!

> What on Earth is "enterprise-level type checking"?

It doesn't mean anything. I guess the author just meant static typing.

I thought that too. What a bizarre phrase to apply to a language he clearly loves. Enterprise level type checking normally means supporting pretty much just the concept of "classes" (ala Java) and calling it a day - leaving the developer(s) to take the burden and create all sorts of god awful "design patterns" to work around fundamental flaws in their language of choice.

I know that is not the case with TypeScript. I believe the recent version added support for union types which is going to blow the mind of the naive JavaScript masses, for sure.

Describing any language as "enterprise grade" is rarely a good thing. Wording and phrasing is important.

I took it to mean the age old type checkers that had zero inference and were more of an annoyance than anything. I'm a bit jaded though.

"Modern" type checking is mostly about not writing types and strong inference

thank you, I went and checked the article anyway and yes, it's not very useful or educated.

"Between Java and Typescript, Typescript is my favorite."

Aka

"Of the two languages I know, Typescript is my favorite."

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