Hacker News Reader

Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes you don't have the type for something, especially if it's 3rd party code. For example, if you are integrating recaptcha with your page: https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/docs/loading

You could try to craft your own type to match google's schema or hunt down 3rd party types, but just doing `(window as any)["__grecaptcha_cfg"]` gets the job done much faster and it's fairly isolated from the rest of the code so it doesn't matter too much.

View on HN

You don't have to provide complete types. If you know what you need to access, and what type to expect (you darn well should!), you only have to tell TypeScript about those specific properties and values.

Generally, the conveniences of allowing any are swamped by the mess it accumulates in a typical team.

Agreed; with 3rd party APIs I type down to the level of the properties I actually need. And when I use a property but don't care what the type is, I use `unknown`. That will throw an error if the type matters, in which case, you can probably figure out what's needed. Although I agree with the article that sometimes fudging the rules is acceptable, it's extremely rare that a 3rd party API is so difficult it's worthwhile. And enforcing `any` as an error means you have to be very intentional in disabling the linter rule for a particular line if that really is the best option.

When you quarantine third party code with an adapter (which you should probably be doing anyway), you can make your adapter well-typed. This is not hard to do, and it pays dividends.

TypeScript has "unknown" for this, forcing you to cast it, possibly to any, every time you use it. A much better type for your variables of unknown type!

Yeah, those are few and far between, generally there will be a DefinitelyTyped for anything popular, and you start choosing libs that are written in TypeScript over ones that aren't.

But for your own handwritten application code, there is no excuse to use `any`.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com