Any tips/thoughts??
I’d switch and I wouldn’t look back. I did switch my focus of learning and use, albeit from Ruby and Kotlin (which is better than nothing but nominative typing is insufficient IMO) to TypeScript, and it was among the best decisions I’ve made in my professional career.
If I had to directly compare the two I think nominative typing is superior only in the case where you have two identically-shaped (down to the property name) classes that have different semantics. I feel like if you are in this situation you should take a very large step back and re-think your decisions.
I've written an enormous amount of code in CoffeeScript since 2013, but have been migrating it to Typescript during the last year, after it became very clear that CoffeeScript is a dead end. One thing that helps a lot with all the braces (instead of whitespace) is using prettier. My editor is heavily integrated with prettier, so with the touch of a key my code is always formatted in some (almost) canonical way.
There’s some learning around how to type things, but not too hard and very worth it. Need at least one teammate / leader who has used c++/java/c#/etc. extensively on large codebases to mentor others.
Teams of one, es6 is fine, typescript setup is probably overkill, especially for an mvp.
I don’t think writing TypeScript actually takes longer once you’re practiced and it eliminates entire categories of error. YMMV, of course, but in 2019 it’s hard for me not to think of a new JavaScript project as somewhat unserious.
I guess it depends on what you’re doing. Setting up the tooling can sometimes be a bit of a pain in combination with other tools which are not designed with typescript in mind from the get go, such as react_on_rails.
If you’re doing a quick mvp in a weekend, I’m still not sure typescript is right. But it really depends on what other tools you are using and how well they integrate. If the mvp works, ya, definitely switch to typescript ASAP. That’s a fine line and really depends on the use case.
- Write/edit code faster - Read/understand code easier
People say this is subjective, but my experience with other developers has shown otherwise. I once asked a team of developers to "just go along with CoffeeScript for 2 weeks" instead of arguing its syntactic decisions (they were developers who had only used C-style syntax languages in the past like Java/C++/JavaScript). All of them ended up loving CoffeeScript and staying with it for years.
Mind you, TypeScript was a very different language back then. Once it started adding features like disjoint unions and the tooling matured, I made the switch.
When you are not writing critical code where lives or huge amounts of money depend on, then I'd say stick to Coffeescript. And when you find a type related bug in your code, fix it and write a test so the bug cannot occur again. Otherwise, first check out Elm, Dart and Livescript. TS is really the last on my list, I've had my share of pain there.