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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

Side note, but IMO Typescript is too complicated. They should have stuck to a reasonably simple type system but now I see projects with incomprehensible and frankly unmaintainable typescript consisting of extremely complex generics, type conditionals, and type constraints. Basically if you aren't careful you'll find your project metaprogramming in typescript's turing complete meta language...

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TypeScript in its current usage reminds me of Hello, World! or FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition. There's almost more code dedicated to typing than the actual running software itself in some codebases I've seen.

The authors trick you with reasonable examples on https://www.typescriptlang.org, but in the wild, you have these ridiculous codebases that couldn't control themselves and they have this insane ratio of multiple declaration files to actual source files and you have to ask yourself, "Are you writing software to get something actually done, or do you just like write type definitions?"

Even people who write in C++ don't go to the lengths that TypeScript users do. It's super weird and cult-like.

I also get lost in types sometimes, but the point of types is that they help you. Typescript lets you just use `as any` and `as unknown` as you please, but you want complex constraints you will need complex types.

There are some type libraries that parse GraphQL queries and CSS selectors. They’re crazy to look at but they’re hugely helpful.

Maybe I just have bad luck, but most of the libraries I've tried that are "crazy to look at" seem good in theory but are janky in practice. For example, openapi-fetch (https://github.com/openapi-ts/openapi-typescript/tree/main/p...), on paper seems great, but has lots of jank in practice.

And I would wager the bugs and jank are in no small part due to the extremely complex generics/constraints.

To be clear, I do like the type-checking benefits of TypeScript, but it requires some discipline to keep it simple. Get one unchecked TS astronaut on the team and the TypeScript can get complex and esoteric very quickly.

This is something I've struggled with as a mostly solo dev. I've most often just stuck with vanilla javascript because of course that's good enough, but definitely there have been times where I hoped I had some typing helping me out. Alas, I haven't quite finagled the art of finding a way to use it "just a little bit."

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