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I'm not sure it's worth addressing this rant because it conflates so many things, but...

> "Oh, look, typescript! Finally JS looks like Java!"

TypeScript's structural typing is vastly different from Java. With Java, every type must be declared somewhere. TypeScript types can be declared, defined as classes, or just based on whatever you typed.

At its core, the TS compiler is just paying attention to what you do and making sure you don't forget what you did elsewhere. It's like having bumper lanes on a bowling alley.

It's arrogant to think you'd get no use out of it when Microsoft, Facebook, and Google have all decided they need static typing on the back and front ends. If you think the cost is too high, that's a different argument, but I'd wager it's because of a poor IDE setup.

> Which means that silly HTML and CSS is going to be easy!

What does this have to do with TypeScript?

> Buzz off back to the backend, you strong-typed clown who doesn't understand what UX and a11y mean.

This is bizarre gatekeeping. TypeScript was adopted by Angular and, early on, seemed focused on browsers rather than Node.

> I know most people love it. I fucking hate it. I'm using it, because I have to, but I never needed it. It literally offers me nothing of value.

That's fine. You may believe it offers no value to you (although better auto-complete and errors are objectively valuable), but it does offer value to anyone who works on your code. TypeScript is like machine-readable self-documenting code.

If you document your code, it might as well be in a format the compiler can enforce and your coworkers can use without having to look back and forth between files.

> I could go on and on about the horror that is typescript

In his talk Predicting the future of the web at the last ReactiveConf, Richard Feldman (not himself a typescript guy, but an Elm user) quoted an interesting statistic that most of developers who try typescript never go back to writing plain javascript. I do not remember where that statistic was from, but can attest that with me it is the case. So much for the horror that is typescript.

> In his talk Predicting the future of the web at the last ReactiveConf, Richard Feldman (not himself a typescript guy, but an Elm user) quoted an interesting statistic that most of developers who try typescript never go back to writing plain javascript. I do not remember where that statistic was from, but can attest that with me it is the case.

Same applies to me, but on the flip side: Typescript (by its very name) is probably only going attract the kind of users who appreciate the kind of things that Typescript provides.

People who insist that dynamic typing is best, that compile-time checks of code is wasted effort etc etc are probably never going to try Typescript (and then go back to JS later on, and thus ruining the "never going back"-statistic).

I feel like Typescript has been very successful (combined with the slightly earlier switch to Node) in converting those that were holding out against typing.

I also can't remember any technology that I've seen so few people complain about online. That was actually part of the reasons for us to start using it.

The worst thing about typescript (and all of the JS ecosystem right now) is the compile times.

> most of developers who try typescript never go back to writing plain javascript

yes, most developers adhere to RDD. That is, resume driven development. You ever see developers going back to Ruby from Node? Or from any shiny new thing to the slightly older but perfectly fine thing? I predict people will move on from TypeScript within 5 years. Purely because everyone will know TS so the differentiating value of TS will plummet.

This is really condescending. I don’t like writing JavaScript, I find writing TypeScript ok.

I avoid both when possible but if the business needs some front end or someone else has chosen Node I’ll oblige, and I’ll be happier if it’s TypeScript.

Either way it’s not contributing to my resume in a meaningful way as a backend developer.

Backend NodeJS is Typescript? At least if you know what you are doing.

"Most" is a fairly strong quantifier, and some people would probably disagree.

Anything new could be termed as an example of RDD, but if that were always the case, we never would have had JavaScript in the first place. One (IMO) useful skill is determining when something new actually provides ROI or is actually a manifestation of RDD or similar.

Unless a language has really great first-class pattern matching (JavaScript does not), I don't ever want to work on a serious project in a dynamically-typed language. The guarantees provided with static-typing and the benefits when it comes to bugs, testing, and refactoring are huge.

Sure, devs that partake in RDD might move on, but there is a good use case for TS that has nothing to do with resumes, and everything to do with a preference in how to build software.

Even if that is true, there is typically a reason things become popular. Right now only Flow / Elm / Purescript could possibly compete in that specific space. Do you specifically see people migrating en-mass to those technologies or do you think something better is coming... soon?

(Or are you literally saying people will go back to JS? - I don't know too many people excited about the prospect of losing all the contextual help and caught compiler errors - and I don't see that happening because of RDD anyway!)

I'm not above going along with tech I think's misguided or bad rather than fighting it, because I know it's trending up and will look good on my résumé, but ask for me to solo-write a Javascript project and tell me delivery must be in Javascript, explicitly not in Typescript, and I'm writing that fucker in Typescript and delivering you the Javascript that tsc outputs, and I don't care if no-one ever knows I did that. It's for my own sanity.

TypeScript is kind of in its heyday though, it's fairly unlikely many teams would be comfortable making a bold decision to "switch back to JS", even if they want to.

Would need to be given more time for such a statistic to be meaningful, if it ever would be.

Not a single developer I know (I was in leadership position in a company with 300+ devs, now I lead a small startup dev team) cares about "heyday". They care about their experience during development being significantly worse with plain JS due to stupid ("we'll use TS because it checks names of properties") but also not so stupid ("we'll use TS because it checks that switches are exhaustive", "we'll use TS because it allows you to check nominal types") mistakes and bugs that TS helps to prevent. For all the devs I know, hearing that they have to code plain JS is the point when they head for exit.

I never said people would "choose" TS because it's in its heyday, I said it'd be an unlikely time for most to wish to justify a switch back.

Most of the types you write in TS will be structural

Indeed, but the few ones that are nominal are making the difference.

CSS is just key-value pairs. How hard can it be? /s

There is absolutely an air of arrogance when people approach seemingly simple things such as styling. And then they implement all sorts of atrocities.

Yeah, I think it might be similar to a lot of things actually. Maybe painting is a good example. Like, the techniques of using a brush in different ways can't be that difficult to learn, but putting them to use to create something great is something else entirely.

You can imagine someone learning those brush techniques and becoming quite confident that they could, theoretically, paint a whole painting, without ever trying and learning the difference.

You see this arrogance everywhere and it's really annoying. The classic joke about it is the "..first assume a perfectly spherical frictionless horse.." one.

or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow

This is what happens when front end is marketed as "easy to get into".

I have 2 acquaintances who work in the medical field ask me about how to pivot to frontend web development. When they asked me about it, I told them that a modern frontend developer needs to at least know one of the major frameworks(ReactJS, VueJS, Angular).

They replied to me in surprise. "You mean CSS and HTML, right?"

That one made me mull over if I should get out of frontend web development altogether.

> I could go on and on about the horror that is typescript

As someone who has seen great improvements in delivered productivity and quality across an entire organization, more or less due to Typescript alone, I would be eager to hear what your complaints are.

The saving grace of Typescript is that types are optional. If types were mandatory for everything, it would be very hard for me to get a buy-in.