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Comment by errantspark | Hacker News Reader

Not OP but I do tend to avoid TS. I don't like the additional friction of working with the language (transpiling, unable to copy/paste directly into an interpreter). I also feel like the community at large writes awful baroque code that makes me want to die. Why use a function when 18 classes subclassing eachother across 4 files will do? If you're familiar with the tiktoker @khaby.lame, TS feels like exactly the over-complicated life hacks he mocks.

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I've found the perfect middleground is typescript checking with JSDoc syntax. The code is just JS, no emitting necessary, but you get all the type checking.

Together with testing of @example stanzas, you get everything for cheap-ish.

Alas, there is no good JSDoc @example test runner¹. This would be very valuable. If there were, I would let that handle my unit tests and focus only on integration testing.

Edit: runtime type checking at the boundary is also valuable! I've tried runtypes, but actually prefer compiling the ts definitions to JSON Schema with typescript-json-schema, and checking with plain JSON Schema validation.

¹I've used @supabase/doctest-js and jsdoctest, and found both lacking. If you know of a better one, please share!

TS !== crazy OOP. For some reason, there are people who just want to use Java style OOP in TS. Nest.js is one library heavily promoting that. I can't digest such codebases, they are the definition of over-engineering to me. Fortunately, out of dozens of medium to big TS projects I worked on, only one used that style. In all the other projects there were very few if any classes.

You can use `ts-node` to copy paste directly into an interpreter. (`npm/pnpm install -g ts-node`)

Fair, I should have been more clear when I said "interpreter" what I really meant is "the chrome debugger" which is one of JS/Node's absolute killer features. I believe support there is on it's way, though I very much doubt it'll convince me of TS' value.

I used to be much more bullish on TS, I like the idea of strong typing in general but the more I use TS the more I feel like it's just the worst of both worlds. I much prefer my types to be deeply embedded in the language design, types as varnish don't make sense to me anymore.

Exactly, this plus adding a new layer of complexity and a new corpo sponsored replacement for something that isn't broken ...

No one using TS claims JS is broken. People want a good type system in javascript, and with that obviously comes a new layer of complexity

The tradeoff is clearly worth it for certain use cases, and clearly not worth it for others. It seems you are discounting and ignoring cases when it is worth it.

I don't think there are no use cases, but I think they are rarer than people think, and that for the most of development TS will be picked because it's someone preference not because of its actual benefits.

Do you really think that use cases for statically typed languages are rare?

TS =/= statically typed languages

Static typing can be a very useful tool especially when the language is designed around it, in TS it is a painful kludge.

You can very easily use chrome debugger on sourcemapped TS files

This is news to me, as far as I know it'll error out when it reads TS on the REPL. How do you enable this?

Oh, in the console? Probably won't work? I'm saying that you can run chrome's debugger on source mapped TS files, which is really really nice for bug-hunting and developing locally

But I mean if the biggest complaint you have is that it doesn't run in a browsers REPL console, that feels pretty minor to me. You can easily find TS REPLs all over the web

Edit: if you are asking about chrome debugger, here's a link to some info https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43627243/using-chrome-to...

Right, but the actual benefit comes from having the REPL and the debugger in the same place. Plus the chrome REPL is fantastic, so suggesting I just use a different one is sorta like saying "you can just use your phone" when my default is a Hasselblad. When I'm writing JS/Node I can write code in the REPL in the context within which it will execute, it really cuts down on how much I have to hold in my head at one time because I can just ask the computer. It also makes exploring much much faster because my iteration times are as fast as the computer can run my code. I find it's a much more natural way of programming and about as close to SLIME as I can get while still writing in a language that has easy economic value.

Not sure if this solves 100% of your problems, but this seems like it could help a bit https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/typescript-console...

Also for me, the benefits of a statically typed language on a large team heavily outweighs not having TS in a chrome REPL. It's not even close. Maybe your use case is different, but for me it seems like you're missing the forest for the trees.

> benefits of a statically typed language on a large team

I mean yeah, sure, if you have to work on a large team in the browser/node you're going to have to make tradeoffs for that, and using TS seems like it'll help everyone go home at 5. I don't think I'm missing the forest for the trees, we're talking past each-other.

To illustrate a bit further, while I like Rust a lot, (the problems it tackles are MUCH more real than the ones TS does) and I put in the effort to learn and use it on a few personal projects I still find myself reaching for C almost universally these days. Even in the case of Rust's very useful tradeoffs I feel like they cost too much of my freedom, and TS' guarantees are much more surface level for a similar cost.

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