Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

I really want to like Deno. I started to watch "just a few minutes" of their keynote (I assume it was the most recent one, this was a month or so ago) and was intrigued by it and ended up watching the whole thing.

Then I went to go play with it add... I ran into odd compatibility issues (no, I don't remember them, I'm sorry) and tried Bun and everything "just worked". I'm sure Bun is not perfect but so far, every one-off script I've thrown at it has "just worked" which is amazing for me since I greatly prefer to work in TypeScript and (until recently with the type-stripping stuff in node) that was way harder than it needed to be.

If I never see an error about how I should change my "type" to "module" only to do it have it complain about 10 other things I will die happy.

I love Javascript, I love TypeScript, I feel like I'm primed to love Deno but all the parts of it felt half-baked. The comments in this article about things like Fresh and K/V store ring very true. I kept looking for things like "What backend framework should I use?" and the answers were all over the place and not very mature options. It felt like I was building on sand.

I hope I'm 100% wrong, I hope deno turns it around, I want more things like deno to exist, but the closing of data centers is not encouraging.

I feel like they bit off more than they can chew. I want to like it, too. But they’re trying to create a whole new JavaScript ecosystem from the ground up, and a lot of it depends on maintaining a seamless compatibility layer that’s always a moving target.

It’s not just node. They have Fresh, which depends on Preact, which is a compatibility layer over the React API. Why? To save a few K on bundle size? They have JSR. Why?

The sales pitch is great: Typescript that just works. But in my experience, it didn’t “just work”. I tried building something with Fresh and ran into issues immediately. I bailed out.

Yea I had the misfortune of thinking I could write it in deno because deno was available in the extra repository of archlinux whereas bun wasn't

Big mistake. my project really required me to have so many custom deno commands like deno run -A --sloppyimports and so much more and that it was really causing me to be unable to find previous history of commands (something which I have in zshrc because of it for some reason)

I really regret not using bun for it. Bun is faster & to me it doesn't matter that much because deno is boasting that it can run nextjs, well quite frankly, I don't use nextjs, I use sveltekit which works on literally every single platform.

And also instead of deno cloud, I personally prefer cloudflare workers with sveltekit. It has been a breeze of mind to be honest, but I am not sure if cloudflare workers is 100% compatible with nodejs/bun but my deployments have always worked for some reason.

Maybe Deno is the PyPy (from Python) to the JavaScript

To me Bun and Deno are more like egcs.

> I love Javascript, I love TypeScript…

Respect. Everyone gets to love something. I’ve been through enough iterations of technology that I don’t attach like that anymore. But I find it interesting when people express these opinions. Can you share a little context? What background you’re from, industry your working in, what motivates your love?

It's interesting to me anyone could honestly like them both.

Personally, I loathe javascript but love typescript.

Since ES6 it isn't that bad.

On my hobby projects I tend to use script tags directly and don't bother with any of the build headaches I have at work, hobby projects are supposed to be fun.

I guess when I say I love Javascript I really mean I love the platform that JS has provided for Typescript. Can't have TS without JS and for all it's warts I loved learning/using JS (way before TS came out).

Now that TS exists I never write plain JS except a few old legacy pages here and there.

There’s a million blog posts out there on this topic, if you are curious. Your questions are a bit probing and feel dangerously close to flamebait.

Sigh. It wasn’t meant to be. There are indeed many and varied opinions on JS. This person seemed particularly exuberant. I was curious. I put the respect in to try and convey “safe to answer”. It appears I failed.

Fair enough, I'm sorry if I read into your comment too much. The troubles of communicating solely via text with people you've never met...

Btw, looks like they did respond, so your effort wasn't in vain.

My work history can be found here: http://linkedin.com/in/joshstrange but my background is, generally, PHP/JS.

I currently work in the POS industry (day job) and Food Festival Payments (my business).

For me, when it's working, the Typescript development experience is bar-none for me. Typescript (Javascript) can run almost anywhere, or at least all the types of devices I would care about targeting. I enjoy using 1 language for backend and frontend development. I'm fully aware of the issues in the TS/JS ecosystem but I still really enjoy writing TS despite that. I feel like I get "tastes" of a perfect future where the issues I have are fixed and I hope the current state of affairs is just growing pains we look back on as we do the IE6 days (which I developed for, some people forgot how bad it used to be).

Being able to write backend, frontend (web, iOS, Android), all in the same language feels like a super power, especially when you can share code between them. Without Typescript (and Vue/Quasar) there is no way I'd be able to run by own company and support web/iOS/Android without cross-platform frameworks utilizing Typescript. I've written Java, I've written Swift, it's not that I can't write them it's just that I'm not good at either and I don't have the time to get better at either.

I haven't played much with other languages (aside from PHP, which I use for my day job) other than a todo/hello-world here and there because at the end of the day TS fills my needs and has something going for it that no other language does, it runs on the web natively. With WASM that might change (has changed?) but for now TS give me the best DX.

I'm not sure if that answers your question and I'm happy to expand further.

Thanks for answering.

Enterprise frontend and backend development, all Typescript. TS is easily the most productive language I've ever used (professionally worked in Java, then Javascript, with some Ruby and PHP). It scales from no-types JS to architecture astronaut seamlessly. You only have to use what's useful to you. My only hangups were esoteric type errors, but AI made this go away (mostly with more specific explanations of the issue).

We ported our webapps from JS to Typescript a while back, and I hate having to read untyped code, even (maybe especially) the stuff written by our best coders, even my own code. You have to run the code in your head just to understand the shape of "order".

I would never go back, I cannot fathom the resistance in the JS community.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com