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Personally, I don't like it either. Firstly - entirely irrationally - because I don't like Microsoft. I grew up with them acting incredibly hostile towards the open source community and the rest of the industry, and I find that hard to forget. I know that has nothing to do with the merits of TypeScript, but I can't say it's not there.
Secondly, I don't like the complexity incurred by any compile-to-JS language. For Figma I bet it's worth it, I bet they did their homework. But the amount of tiny projects I've seen that are an unreasonable maintenance burden because of all the packages and toolchains they use, it'd be funny if it wasn't sad.
I might still use TypeScript, but for me it's more of a "give me a reason to use it" than a "give me a reason not to use it" kind of situation.
It’s done wonders when I’ve had to wrangle poorly commented legacy JavaScript codebases where most of the overhead is tracing what type the input parameters are. Otherwise it’s just nice when writing a small library where you don’t want to setup a bunch of build tools.
Personally, I’m impartial to TypeScript or JSDoc at this point. But I’d rather have either over plain JavaScript.
I do love strong typing, but what I don’t love is a language that mimics strong typing over a loosely typed system. Every single time I’ve used it, I’ve run into some weird problems. A third party package might not have a types file, or it might have an incorrectly-defined type, etc. It can be extremely frustrating in my experience.
but beyond that typescript i find is cognitive overload for someone who considers themselves an expert at vanilla javascript. It more than doubles the development time. I rarely use the inflections because 50% of the time it points to "any" so its utterly useless...and these kids who claim "but you won't get an undefined error!" is just well fix your fucking undefined error when you see it...is my response. WHy do I need to 3x my dev time and hurt my brain in the process so some jackass doesn't have to worry about an undefined variable.
I also think the reason MS released TS is because they were unable to find good devs who knew JS. ALl that typeshit in other languages (most enterprise crap like java and .net/c#) could now all be converted to ts devs without having to rehire. TS is for offshore teams imo.
That being said I will say on a team of 50+ devs on the same codebase I would vote for typescript becuase you will get a shit load of js spaghetti otherwise from these people who can't be bothered to understand js.
We use very strict Typescript, but a lot of our internal utility packages are actually written in pure JavaScript because of the way the Node package environment works. Like our date tool, our helper API package for odata, and, our fascist linting extension package. They're all pure JS with provided types. This is because the handful of people, and the handful of times we work on these libraries it's always people who know exactly what they are doing while they do it. These same people (myself included) won't necessary be in similar positions when we write Typescript, which is why we don't use JavaScript in our day-to-day development. Since our strict Typescript setup protects us from ourselves.
I'm not personally a big fan of Microsoft. Professionally I do think they are one of the absolute best IT-business partners for organisations either enterprise-sized or approaching, because of how they run their support for operations. That being said, I do think what they've done with both Typescript and C# where they sort of mix the best from both languages, has been really good for both languages. At least until you look at something like Blazor which is basically just rebranded web-forms. But I guess that's what happens with large organisations, and at least as far as Typescript is concerned, they seem to be making the "right" decisions.
It also makes reading code a lot easier. I can see where something is used, where it's defined, etc etc. It's much easier to get around.
I love the approach Python and MyPy took there: Python supports but ignores type annotations. You can add them to any part you want and check it with MyPy, but you can truly do it gradually, and you can always decide not to do it. An approach like that would fit JavaScript beautifully, I think.
One thing I never liked about Python is that sometimes it "guesses" the types wrong behind the scenes. This is sort of an issue with most "magic" that you'll also see in some of the parts where Java, C# and others, lets you skip writing a lot of boring code by "guessing" your intentions. But where it's relatively easy to tell the runtime environment how to do it the way you want it in something like C#, it's not in Python. It's also often a lot less obvious unless something fails in a manner you've taken steps to expect.
With JavaScript (and this includes Typescript) you have another set of issues. Since classes, types and so on are all abstractions of object and since Javascript will happily pass "nothing, but not null" around. Well... It's just so easy to make spaghetti or even code which isn't very performant. Things like classes have very little function in Typescript, I'm not saying you should never use them, because you should never be religious about these things. For the most part it's typically better to use a type/interface and a stand alone non-hoisting functions.
Personally I prefer rather opinionated languages like Go, or very strict languages like Rust where everything is very locked down and unmutable until you specifically tells it not to be. Of course Rust comes with it's own "interesting" things like the borrow checker.
I just never really used typing. I started with perl and then did php and ruby for awhile before focusing on javascript. So I never knew what I was missing.
I'm just much much faster in vanilla js than I am with typesh
That’s how TS works too though - compilation just strips the types via babel etc, with type checking a separate process. You opt in file by file by switching .js to .ts
I wonder what would happen if that proposal for type comments in JS went through. Would TypeScript become just a type checker / optimizing compiler?
Google's Closure had an (IMHO) nicer approach (using doc comments for type annotations, see: https://github.com/google/closure-compiler/wiki/Types-in-the...), but I don't get the impression it'll ever catch on outside Google.
However ... the one place I refuse to use Typescript is in my side project - a JS canvas library. I can justify this because: 1. it's a big codebase, but I know every line of it intimately having spent the last 10 years (re-)writing it; 2. nobody else contributes (and I kinda like it that way); and 3. I keep a close eye on competing canvas libraries and I've watched several of them go through the immense (frustrating!) work of converting their codebases to TS over the past few years and, seriously, I don't need that pain in my not-paid-for life.
Even so, I do maintain a .d.ts file for the library's 'API' (the functions devs would use when building a canvas using my library) because the testing, documentation and autocompletion help it offers is too useful to ignore. It is additional work, but it's just one file[1] and I can live with that.
[1] https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas/blob/v8/source/s...