Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway81523 | Hacker News Reader

You didn't like Purescript? It looked pretty cool to me. Its main competition back in the day was Elm, but Typescript has now taken over. From a distance Typescript seems to have too many gaps. I haven't used it though.

View on HN

The Lustre [0] web framework in Gleam was directly inspired by Elm.

[0] https://github.com/lustre-labs/lustre

I think TypeScript can feel like there's too many gaps because not enough people take it seriously enough to truly learn it. Hardly anyone reads a book about best practices/design the way many do about C/Java/Rust.

It's actually a very powerful tool when used thoughtfully. Although it wasn't the first structurally typed language I tried, it's the one that made me fall in love with structural type systems

I like the strutural typing as well. But I hesitate to use TypeScript because AI tells me this:

It Catches: Mismatched function arguments, missing object properties, and typos in variable names.

It Misses: Invalid JSON from an API, unexpected database outputs, and bad user input.

You use Zod if you want runtime features. I'd say it's pretty industry standard. On the type level there's no reason it couldn't account for any of the examples you pointed out. And since Zod supports all the expressiveness of the actual language, you can certainly have those as runtime checks

I would also just like to point out that the "It Misses" your robot pointed out aren't actually flaws with TypeScript but flaws with JavaScript.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com