“I want to build the site in React and TypeScript. I love them both wholeheartedly, I use them for my day job, and they're gonna be around for a long time. Plus writing untyped JS makes me feel dirty.”
That preference is not true for others and I feel like that makes the article’s title misleading.
how many months does that translate to in frontend dev time?
Typescript is here to stay. No question.
React has been a thing now for what, six years? And it feels like 80% of FE job opening require React. And no major shift on the horizon.
Sorry for the sarcasm, I've been trying to learn web development for some months, starting with the basics (HTML, CSS, plain JS) and slowly adding more modern frameworks (Bootstrap, NodeJS, ...).
The course is a few years old already and it feels like 80% of what I learn is now completely irrelevant. I just wonder how frontend developers keep up with that pace.
If I'd write a blog, I wouldn't want to spend half of my time into refactoring and migrating to newer versions, frameworks, etc. But maybe that's just me.
It's a full-time job. I have a cynical theory that this pace is beneficial to webdevs, because as long as they can keep convincing their employers and customers that they need bleeding edge frontend tech, they can enjoy their absurdly high salaries (as compared with the rest of the industry).
Leapfrog.
You learn the newest hotness right now (and hope you're right), evangelize it like a Southern Baptist at a tent revival, ride the wave for a few years until it's obvious the wheels are coming off in one of the three or four predictable ways, then pick up the new, new thing and pretend the past never happened.
It helps to change jobs every nine months or so; otherwise, someone will ask you to do something to that ancient archaic legacy stuff. Nobody wants that.
Understand the principles behind these frameworks, see that they hit just some point between conflicting tradeoffs, understand problem domains and how they interact with these tradeoffs. It's not like jQuery is accomplishing something fundamentally different than React, it's just that they make wildly different design choices that have implications on composability, maintainability, etc.
After you've learned a few of these (and the principles they are built on top of), you'll understand that it's going to be pretty easy to learn the next 10 of them.
We went through all the ‘here to stay’ a few times over already.
Cordova, Bootstrap, Backbone, Coffeescript, Angular, Grunt, Gulp, Require.js/AMD, I think we already moved into and out of React Native lol, that whole Mongo thing, everyone had to be a D3 expert almost at one point, isomorphic apps almost became the thing - Meteor, they were all here to stay.
I don't think there's going to be any new typing system that's 5% better that everyone is going to shift to just because it's the new hotness anymore. Or at least I hope not. TypeScript is good enough, let's just stick with it for the foreseeable future if you want to write type-safe Javascript, please.
I'm still using Angular at work, and I rather like it. If I needed to make an SPA outside of work I'd probably use it over React at this point. But that's a web framework, and those seem to come and go with the wind.
I am not opposed to Typescript, but I am trying to show that we’ve been here before many times.
Or that other time, when Dart was almost here to stay, and on its way to replace JavaScript?
Dart was a push by Google but went nowhere.
TS drives Angular, has first-class support on React and soon in Vue. Most libs have TS typings. Nextjs (amongst others) provide easy TS integration. It’s being pushed by M$, C# and Java like seem to like it and Enterprise (tm) adopts it.
It’s an entirely different beast.
The question wasn't addressed to me, but I'll answer anyway. I started in 1993 and released some widely used web software in 1994.
In your last paragraph you list 13 technologies that supposedly "were all here to stay". If you asked me during the heyday of each technology whether it was here to stay, I would have answered "no" to 12 of them, and "I'm not sure" to meteor. I would have been wrong about Bootstrap because it appears to have been here to stay. I would have been similarly wrong about PHP and Wordpress. My bias appears to be to think things are not here to stay.
TypeScript is here to stay. The value proposition is just too good. And the design decisions have been good enough that it won't be replaced by a better implementation of the same ideas, as happened with several of the technologies you listed. It will go away only when JavaScript goes away, which won't be for a long time (sorry WASM).
React hasn't reached jquery status yet. It does seem like it will be here forever but the next generation of frontend tools will look very different. Will react be amoung them? It's hard to make that jump because React is so great now why change it to match the next fad? But if they skip all fads will they miss the boat.
Is react good enough to say we can stop working on it? I don't think we know what react will end up like. It's doubtful it will be around in 20 years like php. I wouldn't bet on facebook being around after laws are passed limiting how they profit.
But perhaps the frontend developer community has accepted typescript.
All technologies you listed were either a framework or something that made you bend your solution around it. For comparison you can add a type annotation to your vanilla JS code to start using TS goodies.
Comparison to Closure Compiler would be more fitting, but it was a bit awkward and it never achieved a significant fraction of TS's adoption. It probably is still used, but there is no competition between them. Also it never had as good an IDE.