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Comment by kevsim | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I tend to agree. After 18 months with TypeScript, I can't really imagine going away from it. After every single refactoring I do, I'm extremely grateful for proper typing. Not to mention sugar like null coalescing, etc.

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null coalescing is good, but I personally found that Typescript doesn't offer many advantages on a large team. I know it's not cool these days! But it just slows me down and if you're reasoning about functions I never run into that many production level issues with types, but maybe that's just my brain I dunno!

What is it about a large team that causes it to stop offering an advantage? If anything I’d expect it to be more useful as a code base grows in complexity

Agreed, as the team gets larger and an given individual doesn’t necessarily know how everything works from memory the need to rely on the compiler and type safety should grow.

I guess it tends to be superseded by other forms of rot, people writing a bunch of tests that aren't against the critical path, money going down the drain... I agree, it _seems_ like what you say is true. I'm not a computer scientist, I'm just saying I've tried TS at a couple of shops, and as they team grows TS slows us down. Maybe it's just stochastic or random, but at the end of the day there's no academic "proof" types improve developer productivity. The only thing that sort of gets me is how everyone sort of assumes TS is 'best practice' but there's really no evidence besides gut feeling. My gut feeling is now telling me TS is not beneficial... I'd love to play devils advocate against my own position so feel free to tear me apart...

I consistently find types just so useful I don't know how anyone works without them.

Things like when this system was built all the code assumed social security could not be null. We now need to make the system able to handle a null social security system. What code do I change?

Do I need to null check the results of this value?

What does this function return and how can I be sure I'm handling all use cases?

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