How Typescript saved me hours of debugging webpack | Hacker News Reader

How Typescript saved me hours of debugging webpack

medium.com

22 pointsdevonzuegel7 comments

I'm honestly at a loss as to why typescript is not the industry standard now. JavaScript is a mess, and I'm continually surprised to encounter anyone who prefers it.

The JavaScript ecosystem exploded in the last 5 years.

JavaScript developers weren't aware of what adding static typing could bring them and there was so much other stuff happening. Also, because JavaScript grew substantially in these years, many new devs joined and they had enough to do with learning JS.

Then CoffeeScript and later ES2015 came.

Many statically typed languages are able to compile to JS: Scala, Nim, Rust, Kotlin, Clojoure, Dart, OCaml/Reason.

Facebook even tries to add typing directly into JavaScript with Flow, which can even work with comments, so you aren't forced to run it through a special compiler before bundling.

It is slowly coming. Angular is now in typescript, and the amount of praise that ts gets will soon make it mainstream. It is just that all node modules today are in js, which adds to the inertia.

Typescript is amazing to work with daily. It catches so much and like the author said, by going to definition you can often find tons of hints about usage related to the object you're using. Often times, you receive and send objects in functions, and its so helpful if you know exactly what those object properties are instead of just remembering. Typescript makes me love and respect Microsoft just by itself.

JavaScript is a mess, but the TypeScript benefits are a full "buy in". Like implicit or type inference only works when you use 'imports'.

It's a decent amount of cruft that you need to put in and it's not always smooth sailing.

TypeScript sometimes needs hinting and if you're doing it server-side. I once had to fix something in my node_modules because they were doing something wrong and TypeScript wouldn't compile unless I fixed that too.

I'm not saying that it's not worth it.

However, my team were severely turned off when we first started running with this.

I think most teams push back when any new, stricter ruleset is imposed upon them. Sometimes they need some time to see the benefit. I was in the same boat in having to force TS on my team, but they've come to appreciate how effective it is at preventing issues and helping to track down already existing issues. Originally my decision was based on cost, so much dev time is burned away dealing with the shortcomings of JS.

Cool. Webpack is pretty popular. Also, we use brunch at work (mostly Phoenix apps). Even though it's less common, it works pretty well. It's similar to webpack but it currently only has js config (brunch-config.js). It would be cool if someone added TypeScript config support (not TS asset support) and a similar blog post about how to use it.

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