The question is, is it worth it?
I'm starting to feel behind the curve and I want to learn new stacks like Next.js, Typescript and GraphQL. Anyone else feeling this way or have already gone through that learning curve?
I'm starting to feel behind the curve and I want to learn new stacks like Next.js, Typescript and GraphQL. Anyone else feeling this way or have already gone through that learning curve?
Next.js and GraphQL are interesting technologies, but I would say they will eventually fade. They do solve some problems, but they introduce new (hard to fix) ones.
Typescript is here to stay. The improvement it brings to the development experience cannot be understated.
It helps the inexperienced to avoid lots of (minor) bugs and providing much more useful autocompletion/inline docs than any javascript analyzer can.
For the experienced people, it is an invaluable tool when the time for largeish refactorings comes. For the first time you can "follow-the-trail-of-errors refactor" in frontend-land.
Type checking did roughly double our build time. Even then, we do run type checking during builds because we prefer the added safety even with this extra time.
Developers run with an incremental checking watcher. It does add a significant tax, and takes a few seconds after saving in some cases (3-4). We would love that delay to go away, but it is a cost we are more than willing to bear if the alternative is not having type checking at all.
I am guessing that Next.js and GraphQL will be long-dead and obsolete "soon" (in the same way that e.g. jQuery & AngularJS were once also red-hot technologies but are now out of favor), but TypeScript really feels like it is here to stay with significant benefits. I guess this is a "learn technologies, not libraries" type thing?
I was "forced" to learn TypeScript for Angular 2 (that was the library of choice at where I worked at the time) but now also use it for my personal stuff out of choice.
Compared to pure JS it is a bit of a pain to get basic development up and running (since you need a TS -> JS compile step before you load it in the browser, unlike raw JS that you can just code and reload). For that I have created myself simple boiler-plate templates (1) that I use to bootstrap a new project so I can be up and running in a browser in 60 seconds etc (the template will do all the compilation and bundling for you using webpack)
Not as safe of course, but you get 90% of the benefits.
Yes, sometimes you'll run into weird cases where you have to wrestle the type system, but honestly, in the worst-case you can just ts-ignore those (though you probably want to minimize that).
If you haven't worked with a statically typed, compile-time type-checked language before, I think you owe it to yourself to learn one, whether or not TypeScript is the one you learn.
Whether porting existing projects to TypeScript is worth it is of course a question that cannot be answered universally. Depending on how… creative developers were when creating it, it can be incredibly mind-bending.
Typescript is really just a tool for people who want autocomplete in VSCode for their javascript, or who really still want to be coding in C# and unless you're just dying without those things it's a lot of overhead for not much benefit.