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Comment by yashap | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, my personal experience is that easily 95% of devs I work with/have met in person, if not closer to 99%, prefer statically typed languages. Maybe that’s a biased sample, but I do think the overall preference among devs is very strong. I also see JS slowly, more-or-less becoming TypeScript over time.

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My days of being a real software developer are long behind me. So I'm totally willing to accept that I'm wrong here. But when I build a POC in particular, there's a LOT of power and flexibility granted by not giving a fuck about types. Suddenly I can accept non well defined data types (depending on my implementation) and can persist data that otherwise would have taken code changes and approval processes to accept. I do believe there is a place for types, but to type all the things is folly. There are capabilities within JavaScript to handle both.

The malicious beauty of typescript is that at any point you can just declare something "any" and voilá, the guard rails are off.

It’s fine to have an escape hatch when you can’t figure/don't care about types (yes sometimes you should use unknown but that’s another topic)

But at least TS forces (if enabled by strict flag) you to explicitly mark all those places. You can always revisit them later.

Case in point: I’ve written A LOT of redux-saga code and figuring out types for that was exceptionally difficult for me. Sprinkled all that with a ton of anys. Had a few bugs but not anything serious.

Finally rewriting all that slop with async-await and am really happy about it

when I build a POC in particular, there's a LOT of power and flexibility granted by not giving a fuck about types

I find the same thing, but only for very small throwaway scripts and the like. For anything beyond like 20 lines of code, I rapidly hit confusing cases like “is this parameter just a map, or a map or maps?” Then I add types and it makes sense again.

Just use `any` or `unknown` when prototyping, then apply types once your happy paths start working for the first time to start catching the unhappy ones.

>then apply types once your happy paths start working for the first time to start catching the unhappy ones.

I.e. the "I'll go back and add safety later" strategy. Somehow I never seem to get around to doing it.

Like documentation, you should do this while it's fresh in your head, but I get it.

For sure, if I’m writing a short script, no more than ~200 LOC, Python (without type hints) is my favourite language. But for a sizeable codebase, worked on by multiple devs or even just me over time, I’ve got an extremely strong preference for static types.

Also, FWIW, TypeScript is the most “lightweight” statically typed language I’ve ever used, in terms of extra ceremony/lines of code over a dynamic language. Once you get used to its type system, and embrace the structural typing ideas, I feel the overhead is super minimal. It might slow me down by ~5% on a short script over JavaScript, while dramatically improving maintainability as a codebase grows.

Let's make it 94 then. I think typescript is an abomination forced by java developers that don't want to learn javascript.

Guard rails on a bridge are an abomination forced onto us by government because people don’t want to learn how to fly.

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