The more I use typescript I realize I want a more sound and stricter language. Like no prototype overriding at runtime.
Come on, Typescript is more modern than C#. It's just started to being bloated a little bit since there are advanced type operators against structural typings. Or if you have to use a modern example, languages like Scala or Rust are more like it.
Also guaranteed compile + runtime is not what C# is. Probably Haskell is more closer.
I have like 30 different APIs I implement at work, but I only pull out a few attributes from each. I don’t want to go to the moon and back creating types for all this crap, I’ll have more than a 100 different types to model because of all the nested data and convoluted structures the APIs return.
I want the flexibility to incur tech debt where I want to, I don’t want the language to get in my way. That’s what makes JavaScript great!
The real benefit of using a well typed language here is that you only need to parse the data once at this point, after that the type system makes sure the data is of correct format everywhere else in your codebase.
It is a very good library if you control both sides of the communication, and have fit for purpose interfaces. Otherwise, you are better with any lower level library.
Besides, what is it with the strictness of Haskell JSON libraries? There's nothing that will even accept Window's BOM.
With Aeson, You always have the option work with a map directly and pull out properties by name.
That is also especially useful when you can't predict what keys or shape the data will have
But it's a very complex library. It may not show at your code interface, but that complexity is there at the documentation and type errors. It is also famous for generating bad runtime messages. There is even another library for fixing this, at the cost of even more complexity.
If you fall outside of its optimum usage scenario, it won't afford you more functionality than a low level parser, so you are much better saving that complexity and going with the parser.
OP was complaining that it's hard to type some kinds of payloads.
Sure you could write a custom parser for it.
With fromJSON in fact this is what you write. Maybe if you've only been driving Json instances generically, you never actually written a fromJSON instance in Aeson? I only use generic deriving in the simplest cases.. otherwise just write the fromJSON instance parser
My point was that you can defer parsing up front and just return a map of you don't want deal with the shape.
But sure you could write a custom parser as well, that falls more into the typed philosophy though than what js folks are used to
Of course a code review can catch it. Of course careful programming can as well. But those are external constraints.
Having internal constraints greatly reduces the amount of mess one can produce.
Admittedly, sometimes to a point to which you’ve typed yourself in to a corner.
I think TypeScript is essentially for retards. It is like "we need to lock everything down so the mediocre people we have to hire on mass can't break anything".
There are many such compile-to-js languages but none nearly as popular as Typescript is.
But luckily with OCaml/Reason, there is a modern alternative to all these bloated C#/Java like type-systems.
Those are the things that keep people going to TypeScript.
The irony with the Javascript ecosystem is that most of it is now written in typescript or other languages. That includes mainstream frameworks, tools, etc. Basically anything that matters to large numbers of developers. And of course for frontend development people don't actually ship a whole lot of third party dependencies in any case (for code size reasons). So our need for interoperability with all of that is actually pretty low. Most of the dependency hell that is NPM is really about pulling in layers of tooling that fix and work around each other in very odd and convoluted ways (i.e. webpack). React is a comparatively tiny framework of which several compatible even smaller versions exist that people tend to use when they don't care about supporting obsolete versions of javascript. What it does is pretty clever but you can recreate it in your language of choice with not too much effort (and people do this for lots of different languages). There are react inspired frameworks for Kotlin, Rust, and probably Swift, C# and a few other languages.
Typescript is pretty neat if you are coming from the giant Stockholm syndrome in our industry that is Javascript. It's held us captive by being the only choice for browser based development. Thankfully that wasted 2 decades of captivity is coming to an end now. So we can get back on track improving our tooling, languages, and practices. Things like refactoring and code completion are not exactly science fiction (both worked great in the nineties already). I think it's wonderful that e.g. VS Code allowed JS/TS developers to join this millennium two decades late but it's hardly the final answer in developer productivity. Time to move on.
IMHO, using Javascript these days is something to avoid. It's a compilation target at best and as such a stopgap solution until we can target WASM instead, which is possible now, will become very practical soon, and a mainstream/defacto thing to do soon after (2-3 years?). Most of this is pending on some ongoing work on fleshing out features for threading, memory management, apis, etc. Languages like typescript have a transitional role in the brief period of time that remains where transpiling to and interoperating with javascript is still better/easier/more convienient than compiling to WASM. Beyond that, unless you have a lot of javascript legacy that needs to be preserved/worked around, there are probably other languages that you might prefer to use instead. And as I argue above, there isn't actually that much code to rewrite if you consider what little of the NPM ecosystem actually ends up in your application on browsers. A few thousand lines of React code don't justify being held captive by that ecosystem. Also, most frontend code doesn't actually survive its first birthday in any case. So, what legacy?