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Comment by wryoak | Hacker News Reader

If you write a web language as a primary part of your job, you might not be an engineer.

In all seriousness though, I hate having to add a bunch of tooling to my dev process so that I get to write extra syntax to avoid warnings about valid code in the language as it is actually interpreted by the VM. It’s bureaucratic bs, so yeah, I avoid roles heavy on TS.

JS has a type system already. Its rules are laid out in easy to read specs. Maybe ”engineers” should learn how JS works instead of placing “safety” features in the way of their half baked understanding of the code and how it interacts with external data from the DOM, http requests and so on.

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If you write a systems language as a primary part of your job, you might not be an engineer.

In all seriousness though, I hate having to add a bunch of tooling to my dev process so that I get to write extra syntax to avoid warnings about valid code in the language as it is actually interpreted by the CPU. It’s bureaucratic bs, so yeah, I avoid roles heavy on C.

Assembly has a type system already. Its rules are laid out in easy to read specs. Maybe ”engineers” should learn how Assembly works instead of placing “safety” features in the way of their half baked understanding of the code and how it interacts with external data from the terminal, disks and so on.

This. I love snow clone slippery slopes.

Typescript is about reducing and almost eliminating runtime errors. We rarely have any errors show up on our error monitoring tools because of Typescript.

TS does not have a VM. So you’re starting off on the wrong foot. And JS does not have a type system at all.

Also, you shouldn’t gatekeep who is/isn’t an engineer.

JS has a dynamic type system. You may not like it, that doesn't mean it doesn't have one.

Otherwise, no programming language would have a type system except for Idris, for exactly the same reason.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding, could you give me an example?

Do you mean the fact that it can imply a variables type from assignment?

Edit: I’m plainly wrong, mishmashing words.

Yes JavaScript has a dynamic type system

Type systems don't deal with variables. Type systems deal with interactions between values. Maybe those values are inline, maybe they are stored in variables.

You don't imply anything from an assignment other than the variable now has or is pointing to the new value. This is the same in every programming language. The only difference is that some programming languages gatekeep what you can assign to a variable based on types.

I was referring to JS’s VM since TS outputs JS, but I could be misusing the term in that regard too.

And I’m not gate keeping who is an engineer, I was ironically rebuking the gatekeeping of the comment to which I’d responded.

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