Comment by jakub_g | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jakub_g | Hacker News Reader

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In my team people object to TS due to a few things: additional complexity, additional build step, build time increase, copy-pasting code around (to console, code snippets etc.) does not work anymore (but last time we talked it was soon after coffeescript -> esmodules migration and I guess everyone was tired of coffeescript which might have affected the mood).

There's no unanimous consensus that TS is all gold; some people who are fine with types don't like certain TS implementation details and in fact some devs start saying out loud that sometimes it's very difficult to fight TS with certain constructs.

Something that's gaining popularity and what I'm trying lately is using JS + jsdoc annotations more thoroughly, which gives the niceties of TS (when using vscode) without the downsides and heavy compilation step:

https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/jsdoc-supported...

While gaining popularity, JS + JSDoc is misguided and not a solution. The compiler is what is required to actually enforce standards within a team - otherwise what you have is a completely informal process.

I don't think type docs are useless - on the contrary, they are super helpful while migrating. But I think this trend is indicative of a different issue - what we are really seeing is more of a protest that JS needs native optional type support as soon as possible.

I loathed typescript at first because of the heavy compilation step, but setting it up to compile only when it was necessary (building for production), and to transpile the rest of the time (running tests, starting a server locally) made a huge difference for our team. A slow compilation step really is a huge cost!

> Something that's gaining popularity and what I'm trying lately is using JS + jsdoc annotations more thoroughly, which gives the niceties of TS (when using vscode) without the downsides and heavy compilation step

I'm a big fan of this as well. Webstorm also supports it.

It feels like the right balance to me, as it gives me a heads up when things don't match, but doesn't require that I go through the tedium that TS imposes once it touches a project.

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