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Comment by ktbwrestler | Hacker News Reader

I’m not a frontend guy but heard that typescript is already falling off and contentious at this point. Is it truly something that’s going to stay?

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You heard wrong.

The only way typescript is going away is if JS essentially incorporates it.

The only things people don't like about it is that you need some tooling and a build step.

However, with its popularity, ts is built in to a lot of things, so the tooling usually isn't a big burden (particularly to get started).

And it's viable in a lot of cases these days to forgo the build step and instead use JS with typescript type annotations. (That might be what you heard about. That's really still using typescript, though.)

>The only things people don't like about it is that you need some tooling and a build step.

Wrong. Many people dislike many things about Typescript.

https://levelup.gitconnected.com/the-inevitable-decline-of-t...

https://medium.com/codex/why-are-javascript-pros-saying-good...

https://gomakethings.com/ditching-typescript-for-javascript/

https://www.reddit.com/r/sveltejs/comments/12cyady/are_you_l...

There are plenty more examples of why people tried typescript and went back to javascript. It's definitely not only because of a build step, but also "type gymnastics", and other code bloat.

Claiming "many people" and proceeding to link to 4 posts that use Svelte as an example is a bit silly considering Rich Harris has said, numerous times, that the decision in Svelte's codebase should NOT be taken as advice for what to do in your codebase, because their decision only pertains to a very specific set of circumstances.

I was countering the previous comments assertion that "the only reason" people don't like typescript was because it has a build step, and your comment doesn't prove me wrong.

Typescript has a lot of momentum on all fronts and is almost certainly the future of Javascript.

The big problem is that it still requires transpilation, which can set up all sorts of shitty traps. Not to mention that the Javascript ecosystem in general is a horrendous mess, which Typescript on its own can’t fix.

The future of JavaScript is in the past. Get rid of all the stupid transpilers and frameworks and just use plain JavaScript in the browser.

Yeah once they implement the proposal to add types we will

The whole point of JavaScript is that it's dynamically-typed. If you want static typing just use C++ or any other established programming language.

I’m not sure how people are supposed to do that in the browser. This feels like an excessively dismissive comment.

Have you not heard of WebAssembly?

WebAssembly is not without tradeoffs either. I'm not an expert, but it's often heavier due to bundling the native language's stdlib; it's annoying to interop with the browser environment because that's still JavaScript-tailored; it's also just hard to write code that can be compiled into WASM (e.g. in Rust, it needs to be `#[no_std]`)

If you're doing real work, you don't interact with the browser.

If you're just glueing things together between APIs, then JavaScript is fine, and static typing would just get in the way.

> it's dynamically-typed

Yet, most of the code people write has statically defined types.

Anyway, the whole point of JavaScript is that it runs on the browser. Outside of that, it has no strong points. Even though most of them are not weak enough to immediately abandon the language, its type system is one of the weakest.

Javascript's dynamic typing is fine if you aren't a really shitty programmer.

With possibly the exception of Typescript, I agree. Practically all the tools commonly being thrown at JavaScript today are destroying the developer experience and causing more problems that begat even more tools. It's easier than ever to use plain JavaScript in ways that use proper scoping, but so many developers today speak as if this is impossible ("it just doesn't scale bruh"). That's how you know you're talking to someone who didn't write software before ~2011. It's fine if someone prefers to use said tools, but the idea that more tools are are necessary is an example of poor engineering.

Where have you heard that? Because Typescript is the defacto standard right now. Projects like bun and deno cement that status further.

There a very limited number of high profile, very niche projects that have switched to types via comments to skip transpile time. (IIRC, a super low level part of the Deno engine.) This does not represent the industry moving away from TypeScript.

IMO the only way TyoeScript is going away is if all the useful components end up getting merged into JS. It’s simply too useful.

Typescript is only becoming more solidified each year.

A couple of relatively high profile projects stopped using it. Meanwhile across most industries companies use it, I almost never encounter vanilla JS projects these days

> heard that typescript is already falling

Don't believe in everything you hear.

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