What about flow gives it better support for React than TS (other than it being built into the CLI)? Why does it fit more perfectly with Redux than TS? Why is it easier to learn than TS? Why does it have a more amazing type system than TS?
- Flow has more & better type definitions for React than TS. I think it's because a lot more React devs use/develop Flow and also both are FB projects.
- For our Redux + Flow setup, we export an ActionCreator type that is a union of all action creators we've defined. This union gets refined by the switch statements in reducers, allowing us access to well typed action creators in reducers, without having to deal with import/export of individual types.
- The docs are pretty good. Several of my colleagues are new to static typing, and have picked Flow up easily because of the docs. I also heard some interest in providing video courses like Egghead.
- Flow has an amazing type system compared to Java. Except for enums though. Java Enums are much much better.
Of course it also means you can't upgrade React without upgrading Flow, and you can't target a specific (older) version of React without downgrading Flow.
What's stopping you from doing this in Typescipt?
The experience I've had around typing higher-order components in general, and specifically with the recompose library (https://github.com/acdlite/recompose), which I use heavily in just about every React project, has been much better in Flow than in TypeScript. Now this is not completely fair to TypeScript since the recompose types for it were still a work in progress last time I tried it, but recompose is a central building block in most of the codebases I work with on a day-to-day basis, so good typing around it is a vital consideration for me, and possibly others who prefer to work with React components using functional composition.