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Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

> How? There are a few notable improvements we’d like to give more details on in the future. But we won’t make you wait for that blog post.

the typescript project continues to set the bar extremely high in terms of changelog and clear communication. love you so much, drosenwasser and co!!

> Decorators are an upcoming ECMAScript feature that allow us to customize classes and their members in a reusable way.

huh. i thought this was a bit early to do this but i checked (https://github.com/tc39/proposal-decorators) and looks like they've moved to stage 3. curious how this is going to change library/api design in the long term.

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I don't think decorators being a proposal matters at this point. I know I've been using them for 5+ years now, and libraries such as NestJS already use them extensively.

If you like them, you're probably already drowning in them. Me, personally, I could take them or leave them.

NestJS uses the previous, incompatible decorators implementation IIRC.

And, because it does so, you can fall down really deceptive holes due to the lack of typing around things that decorators apply to, like parameters.

I don't think that changes with stage 3 decorators, unfortunately. It makes NestJS really error-prone, in my experience, and it's a big reason I stopped making tooling for NestJS projects.

Yeah, it's going to be really "exciting" for Angular users as well in the next few years because Angular is drowning in those old "experimental decorators" which are not wholly compatible with today's Stage 3 decorators and the transition is going to be error prone and tedious. Up until TS 5.x it at least gave you a compile error if you tried to use decorators in code without the "experimental" flag, but now they will compile (except where they don't) even if you have the wrong flags but the behavior is so different between the flags it likely won't run. That's going to cause some interesting havoc.

yeah also feel quite ambivalent about them. theyre opaque syntax sugar. dont provide enough value to me personally but i wont begrudge others

What do you use decorators for? I've never used them and I'm curious what the usecases are. The logging thing looks helpful.

silly things, mostly. Redux used them such as "@connect" if I recall. But I haven't touched those in awhile. Other team members invented various ways to use them, but none ever seemed to make things clearer or save much typing.

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