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Comment by throwaway92921 | Hacker News Reader

Gotta say I’ve tried using TS and frankly haven’t seen too much benefit. This makes me suspicious since I’m clearly in the minority about this.

I find it mildly useful as a form of documentation - and the intellisense is nice, but otherwise find it cumbersome to use.

In general - while I’ve experienced some issues with types in JS, it usually isn’t the root cause of most bugs I encounter.

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Every time I say "I'm not gonna beed typescript for something this small", something happens that makes me think typescript may have been better anyway.

I agree, but I do wonder why the knee jerk reaction is "I'm not going to need it". The setup cost is basically zero! If TypeScript offers any benefit at all, why _not_ use it, since the benefits will come at near zero cost?

> since the benefits will come at near zero cost?

Maybe if you already have learned TS, otherwise there is a huge cost to learning it.

Sure but my gripe is with those who already use TS

IMO the benefits of TS are huge, but probably the biggest benefit is that refactoring becomes almost trivial in most cases - just change the type of a variable/function/etc and the compiler will tell you every line in your codebase that needs to change in real time.

> refactoring becomes almost trivial in most cases

And when it does not become trivial, it is an indicator it would be borderline impossible without it.

After a rather extensive refactor I once did the compiler gave me over 4.000 typescript errors. It would be a tremendous effort for all of these to be identified and ironed out, probably taking years because many issues were very circumstantial.

The benefit is, your project needs a compiling phase in order to run. It's safer than just deploy and run your javascript code without that phase.

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