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Comment by samuraiseoul | Hacker News Reader

A step back 20 years in programming is quite a statement to make. What is your backing for saying that? What is Typescript doing that other languages 20 years ago discovered was bad?

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I was programming all these languages and 20y I do web technologies. Dynamic typed languages with a neat syntax was a huge step forward, developer became powerful with a single line of code. The biggest discovery was - you need all that tooling, because your language is overcomplicated. I also participate many conferences back and frontend each year (sometimes each month) watching this weird and artificially made transition backwards in concepts not only on frontend.

So yes ~20y ago was that point where developers discovered they are more powerful with dynamic typed languages and a boom for web applications started.

What about the lost productivity from debugging really simple errors that would have been caught by type checks?

You stop doing really simple errors if you allow yourself to train in this direction. Really simple errors are really easy to fix. After all boilerplate and effort you make in this kind of typed languages is not worth it. I'm not saying now about inventions like Crystal, where there is no effort + there is performance benefit. But TypeScipt adds complexity, boilerplate, and it still compiles to JS so no performance benefit.

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