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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

The amount of fanboyism in these comments is astounding.

TypeScript is a great tool.

At the same time, people have written apps with vanilla JavaScript for a very long time now, and it works just fine. If types are really that big a deal that you have a hard time writing an application without a compiler checking your types, you should reevaluate what you're doing. It's not "dangerous" to use plain ol' JavaScript, and implying that others are foolish for not using it reeks of software snobbery.

Whoa, you mean people really still use plain JavaScript, bruh? I mean, don't you need like punchcards for that? That's how grandpas program, bruh. You can't even, like, scale an app without type-checking. An app written without TypeScript is like a house of cards, dude.

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>If types are really that big a deal that you have a hard time writing an application without a compiler checking your types, you should reevaluate what you're doing.

Implying that everyone has exceptional short term memory, and reading old code has virtually no cost.

I never said that TypeScript wasn't helpful. The picture painted by some people that frontend applications without compile-time type-checking are ready to fall apart at the seams and have knobs and springs go flying everywhere, like something from a Looney Tunes cartoon, is patently absurd.

Given what I said, Even for fairly simple examples, it would still be more bug prone, simply due to humans not having perfect cognition. At scale that can add up.

Also keep in mind that this both enables, and follows a trajectory of increasingly complex frontend applications, previously a lot of interactive stuff was done server side.

Patently absurd, if you take it as a strawman, sure. You ended up using that to paint the complete opposite picture, which was essentially that Typescript doesn't actually add any real value, only "perceived" value. Which is true, if all you value is the execution environment. Keep in mind that Typescript was not the first attempt at trying to "tame" Javascript. One example that comes to mind is Coffeescript.

The natural reducto ad absurdum is thus, well why aren't we just writing in ASM, it all boils down to that anyway, right? People were doing fine then too... Could it also be said that accusing people of needing "crutches" is also snobbery?

> The picture painted by some people that frontend applications without compile-time type-checking are ready to fall apart at the seams and have knobs and springs go flying everywhere, like something from a Looney Tunes cartoon, is patently absurd.

This is a great analogy for my experience with JS projects. Most bugs are found at runtime, which is incredibly frustrating and time-consuming.

It's like making your swords out of bronze when steel is just sitting there.

I'm sure there are users of Dart who feel the same way about TypeScript.

> If types are really that big a deal that you have a hard time writing an application without a compiler checking your types, you should reevaluate what you're doing.

Speaking of software snobbery, what does this statement reek of? This attitude is just as condescending and utterly non-constructive as the fanboyism you're describing.

I'm currently building a fairly large application using TypeScript both on the front end and backend specifically because I "have a hard time writing an application without a compiler checking your types". It's working great but according to you this is a valid reason to reevaluate what I'm doing?

People have written apps in C for a very long time now, and they work just fine, but it's not exactly the first language of choice for new projects these days outside of some very specific niches.

Maybe I'm failing to get my point across. I'm not saying that JS is the end-all-be-all of frontend languages, but that some people are speaking as if TS is the messiah and that any JS compiled without it is flimsy garbage. That tells me that people either have limited experience with TypeScript or they were poorly educated when they first began using JavaScript. TypeScript is probably a good tool for them to use. TypeScript is becoming more popular, perhaps with good reason, but the negative attitude TS fans have towards JavaScript is often very immature.

As you say, there are still niches where C is good, and C is going to be around for a very long time because it's used for so many things. To claim that someone can't write a well-built application that is maintainable and scalable is asinine. I myself probably wouldn't choose to write an application in C, but that doesn't mean I'm going to thumb my nose at anyone who decides to write applications with C. C is perfectly fine, and if someone is frustrated with it, then maybe it's just not the right programming language for them.

This is not fanboyism.

" people have written apps with vanilla JavaScript for a very long time now, and it works just fine. "

No, it doesn't, or else TS would not exist.

TS just outclasses JS on almost every front, it's not a religious statement, it's generally true: TS is the standard, it just has too many advantages over JS to allow JS inside the roost.

Though article is only misleading to the point wherein they're talking about TS vs other languages, for solving other problems.

> " people have written apps with vanilla JavaScript for a very long time now, and it works just fine. "

> No, it doesn't, or else TS would not exist.

Think about what you just wrote there.

It's also entirely possible that a given tool can work fine, but other people can build on top of it without irrationally claiming that said tool doesn't work. Elixir and Kotlin are examples of tools that improve upon other runtimes(Erlang and Java), but I've yet to hear anyone from either language community act so dismissive to anyone who chooses to write applications in Erlang or Java as some TypeScript users are towards vanilla JavaScript users.

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