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Comment by james-mcelwain | Hacker News Reader

It's important to remember that there are still a lot of front-end folks who aren't interested in application engineering, but still might find these frameworks useful. For those kinds of people, static typing is a harder sell.

For anyone else, yeah, they should probably be using TypeScript in 2020.

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I adopted typescript shortly after it’s release and went through growing pains in the first couple years. I don’t use it often now. And it ALWAYS comes back to bite me in the butt when doing any decent sized project. If I had to guess time spent fixing things that would have been caught out weights the cons of using typescript

Forgive me, but I’m having trouble parsing this. Are you saying you recommend using Typescript, or not?

If yes, why do you not use it often now?

Sounds like they think time spent fighting the language outweighs any pros TS might have, and thus aren't recommending it.

Edit: read it wrong, nevermind.

No, he's saying the opposite (as in TS scales better with project size).

> time spent fixing things that would have been caught [by Typescript] out weights the cons of using typescript

Correct. Most of my projects now and days are under 300hrs greenfield stuff. I do feel typescript can be a little more overhead to get started, once you have some well established patterns IMO its great for more enterprisey projects.

I read the exact opposite: that they regret not using typescript for non-trivial projects because tsc would have prevented dumb mistakes due to a lack of types.

Correct. Small project turns into a bigger project, I think I can get through some complicated piece and BAM. I'm fighting silly typing issues and writing tests for stuff I would never have to do if I used typescript. While majority of my stuff is not that complicated, it seems there is always something.

I also wear a bunch of hats. So retaining all the new knowledge gets a bit hard. Sometimes its easier for me to fall back to patterns I used over the past 20 years of full stack development. If I had the time I would use typescript everywhere.

I recommend it. I dont use it because I dont think I need it. I think mostly because I fall back into old patterns that are easier for me to do. I got burned a bit with original build system having to create all my interfaces etc.

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