Where is the proof that Javascript is a better language than Typescript? How do you know if you should be writing in Java/Python/C#/Rust/etc? Probably should wait to create your startup lest you fall into a psychological trap. That is the ultimate conclusion of this article.
It's ok to learn and experiment with things, and to build up your own understanding of the world based on your lived experiences. You need to be open minded and reevaluate your positions as more formalized understandings become available, but to say it's too dangerous to use AI because science hasn't tested anything is absurd.
This is an interesting question really. It feels like it would be really hard to do a study on that. I guess the strength of TS would show up mainly as program complexity grows such that you can't compare toy problems in student exams or what ever.
Well that position is hopelessly circular, filled with sophistry and fallacy. Descartes proved that one wrong in the 1600s. "Cogito, ergo sum,"
> Where is the proof that Javascript is a better language than Typescript?
Any 'best' question relies upon an answer to the question of for what objective purpose. Not providing that answer, is the same as dissembling circularly, and any conclusion based on that is more likely to be false than true. False beliefs in this manner are by definition, delusion.
We have one study on test driven development. Another study that attempted to reproduce the results but found flaws in the original. Nothing conclusive.
The field of empirical research in software development practices is... woefully underfunded and incomplete. I think all we can say is, "more data needed."
hwayne did a talk on this [0].
If you ever try to read the literature it's spartan. We certainly haven't improved enough in recent years to make conclusions about the productivity of LLM-based coding tools. We have a study on CoPilot by Microsoft employees who studied Microsoft employees using it (Microsoft owns and develops CoPilot). There's another study that suggests CoPilot increases error rates in code bases by 41%.
What the author is getting at is that you can't rely on personal anecdotes and blog posts and social media influencers to understand the effects of AI on productivity.
If we want to know how it affects productivity we need to fund more and better studies.
I seem to recall at least some research dating back to the 90s on the topic, which showed how much better (by some metric I can't remember) Ada was wrt most other languages of the time.
Yes, we have decades of such research, and the aggregate result of all those studies is that no productivity gain can be significantly demonstrated for static over dynamic, and vice-versa.
I'd be interested in the type of structured research the author is interested in. Could it also be researched whether Go or PHP is better for web development? In some sense, I guess. Both are probably more efficient than writing Apache extensions in assembler, but who knows?
It’s a formal acknowledgement that humans make mistakes, implicit assumptions are dangerous and that code should be validated before it runs. That’s literally the whole point, and if developers by type were YOLO I’ll push it anyway, TS wouldn’t have got anywhere near the traction it has. Static typing is a monument to distrust.
It lets you chain data from one task to another based on knowing what possible and available given the types. That information just straight up doesn't exist in JS code, unless you write JSDoc comments all over with that information as static analysis hints. But why not just embed that information in the language itself instead of tacking it at the top of every chunk of code, much more elegant and allows way more power.
Even if you used JSDoc, you still need that static analysis tool to exist, and hey, that's exactly what TypeScript is. It's both a language definition for augmenting JS with types, but it's also a transpiler which takes TS code and spits out JS code, _and_ it will tell you if there's problems with the types. But since that engine exists, you can plug it into LSP and so on.
Remember, LSP exists _because_ of TypeScript. VSCode exists because of TypeScript. The team that works on VSCode and came up with LSP did it because they wanted TypeScript to integrate with VSCode and they had the foresight to build something generalized that could be used for ANY language.
It seems messy. Just one example that I remember because it was on HN before: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/this-is-how-science-happens...
correct me if I'm wrong those studies would not have looked at TypeScript itself, which for all I know could be complete garbage designed to lock you into MSFT products.