> TS catches me writing numerous bugs a day
I see this sentiment a lot but I honestly can't think of any non-trivial bugs that TS has caught for me. 99% of the bugs it catches I would see 1 second later when my page hot reloads and crashes.
I see this sentiment a lot but I honestly can't think of any non-trivial bugs that TS has caught for me. 99% of the bugs it catches I would see 1 second later when my page hot reloads and crashes.
Of course with a big, venerable project the balance changes drastically. But an experienced single-person project should be doable with javascript for a long while and may even get to MVP faster by focusing on things that are essential.
Now I’m addicted to it. Specifically the lightweight and easy to use _interface_ directive feeds my practice of self-documenting code with good doc and reusable data structures.
Still even with TypeScript if types makes your functions ugly, then it shows the complexity of the code. Often it also suggests sensible refactoring that without types would not be apparent.
Javascript: "function area(left, top, right, bottom)"
In an editor the typescript function would likely be split into five separate lines.
"function area(
left: number,
top: number,
right: number,
bottom: number)
: number {"
None of the functions are complex but the the typescript function with the formatter creates a lot of noise.
It also means it's not going to explode when fed the wrong types, because that's not possible.
If I'm working on a function foo(bar, baz), I know exactly what bar and baz are before looking at a single line of it, I've been tracing the code through to that function, how could I not know what the data types are at that point?
Your described experience is the rare exception when working with third party vendors, on long lived projects, or with teams that are not trivially small.
If I were to come up with environment where it is guaranteed to be a net positive it would be a company with lack of boundaries between teams and a lot of churn.
Essentially TS averages out engineers in your team. You're going to be slower, but more predictable. Your 10x engineers will become 5x, but 1x will become 2x.
It’s the other way around. For more experienced engineers TypeScript is a huge productivity multiplier: you can fly around a large code base with ease, making changes all over.
More experienced engineers also probably have some history with other statically types languages (perhaps Java, Swift or C++) so the concept of static typing is likely to be familiar to them.
For less experienced engineers, there are more drawbacks such as 1) additional language complexity and 2) possible unfamiliarity with static typing. Although TypeScript still a productivity boost because they are likely to have a higher error rate.
See, I've heard it multiple times. And yet nobody is able to provide evidence. Surely if effects are so huge it's should be easy to prove. We're commenting on the article that says TS is 10 years old. Where is the hard evidence?
When you ask about real examples of productivity boost, TS folks shift focus to bugs (why not talk about bugs in the first place?). When you ask about critical bugs, TS folks shift focus to IDE autocompletion. When you press for evidence, goal post is constantly being moved.
Whenever you see bold claims and no evidence other than personal stories for several years, you should immediately attribute it to placebo (or other biases).
> you can fly around a large code base with ease, making changes all over
Not really, unless you're talking about bloated codebases. Huge codebases are huge due to domain complexity, you can't be making changes all over without extensive testing. What does help is having a modular codebase with good boundaries. If you already have it, TS benefits are tiny. If you don't, you're better off spending time making it modular than switching to TypeScript.
> TypeScript still a productivity boost
And yet if you talk to popular library maintainers in Python/JS community, a lot of them say that types have slowed them down. Some of them still believe it was worth it, because it helps users of those libraries. But again, see how the goalpost is being moved?
Get off the high horse, static vs dynamic has been a never ending debate since the dawn of time.
Just because you side with one religion doesn't automatically make it "well known". Learn to recognize your own biases.
Here, enjoy the trivial search and read through links and their references:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Evidence+for+productivity+an...
TLDR: for productivity, there's basically no measurable impact detected in studies, positive or negative. For security and bugs, the impact is as expected: dynamic languages are as safe as strictly typed languages if they are paired with exhaustive test suites which enforce type safety. You can either write the type information alongside the application code, or write the test suite to enforce it.
Folks who think Dynamic Typing frees them of having to consider types are just fooling themselves; in this thread, even, the argument is that because they know what the types are then stating them is just unnecessary "noise". Which is all well and good, in the here and now, but provides no value when the code is foreign or forgotten; and with just a little additional syntax both the information is available to the programmer and the compiler can perform performance and security analysis with greater ease.
> for productivity, there's basically no measurable impact detected in studies, positive or negative
As I said, controversial at best.
But you're not being completely honest here. Most research is either inconclusive, or says dynamic is more productive. It is nearly impossible to find research that says static typing is more productive.
Which is quite obvious today, Uncle Bob and Steve Yegge were talking about this since 2000s.
https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/is-weak-typing-str...
https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=4639
> with just a little additional syntax
Unfortunately a little additional syntax easily turns into this:
f(): Array<Promise<ServerResponse.Response<Proto.Response>> | undefined> {...}
And gradual typing is the worst. It is either a terrible idea, or at least a terrible implementation (looking TS/mypy). It combines the worst of two worlds.
The only viable benefit of gradual typing is making dependency hierarchy explicit.
If the a team can distinguish between an average and excellent programmer's performance by the time it takes to read or write type information then I expect the skill and experience breadth within the team was already narrow.
If there are so many parameters that it falls out of mental context then there's too many parameters.
This is definitely sometimes not easy, and of course it'll get more difficult generally the more code there is or the more complex (usually meaning bad!) the design is, but I'd almost put it the other way round to your perspective - the types are like the signposts in this design evolution and discovery process. They don't make it easier to do the work of refactoring a design, but they do make it much easier to understand when I'm going in a good/bad direction and also when I have succeeded.
However TypeScript’s structural typing is much more flexible, because it is designed to describe the types of all the existing JavaScript code out there (via the DefinitelyTyped project).
This gives the best of both worlds: the freedom to express the architecture you need, plus the freedom to actually refactor an existing code base into that new architecture without introducing many bugs. Dynamically typed languages give you the former but not the latter.
In short, there is very little empirical data on this, and it’s almost entirely anecdotal. My gut feeling is that if typing were a huge benefit it wouldn’t be so hard to prove.
Edit: I should add that I think there are a ton of things that are far more important for a high performing dev team than types.
With TS you're paying the full price (in verbosity and complexity) but getting 10% of the value. There probably still are projects where it's a good deal, but my bet is they are the minority.