Big projects are ditching TypeScript… wtf? - The Code Report : programming

[-] alokir@lemmy.world 50 points 3 years ago

The title makes it seem like it's a wide spread thing in the industry but according to the video it's 3 frameworks.

Yeah, it's additional work but I've found that really convoluted or complex type definitions usually mean you should consider refactoring. Of course this is a bit different when it comes to developing frameworks where you might want to support a bunch of different use cases.

Maybe I'm biased because I've been using TS ever since it first came out.

[-] jeremyparker@programming.dev 9 points 3 years ago

And Rich Harris (Svelte) said, it's an issue for people in his position, aka, people making tools for developers - he fully expects and respects that the end users (developers using those tools) don't really experience the downsides.

That said, I feel like we're seeing a lot of versions of complaints about how big the stacks are getting, how big the foundation is that we "need" just to get started. That desire for minimalism is core to the developer mentality imo, it makes us good at our jobs. I think we're going to see more paring down and culling in the coming months/years.

[-] Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world 32 points 3 years ago

And once again, clickbait YouTuber spreading bullshit appears

[+] TheLurker@lemmy.world 26 points 3 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

[deleted]

[-] newIdentity@sh.itjust.works 21 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

Not really satire. It's pretty clear when he's serious and when he isn't.

[-] Stephen304@lemmy.ml 18 points 3 years ago

Imo calling his channel satire for his use of comedy is akin to calling TechLinked satire because of their use of comedic quips, heckler, and goofy quick bits transitions. Satire implies a level of irony or insincerity, which I don't think code report falls under. His videos might be comedic but the topics covered are serious and factual.

[-] DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 years ago

How about zero.

Clickbait is an act that should be responded to with non responsiveness

[-] ck_@discuss.tchncs.de 24 points 3 years ago

Clickbait - The silent killer

Soon on Netflix (probably)

[-] MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 years ago

You won't believe how many people watched it!

[+] elbarto777@lemmy.world 14 points 3 years ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

[deleted]

[-] mo_ztt@lemmy.world 27 points 3 years ago

I clicked, sorta interested in the topic because as it happens I just abandoned Typescript in favor of learning Go for a little nascent project I'm working on. (We do these things not because they are easy, but because they eventually will be good which Typescript+Node apparently never will for my particular project.) Then I saw it was Fireship and clicked back away.

Now it sounds like you're saying that what they're claiming is the issue is the one good thing that happened with Javascript in the last however-many years. Yes, it's a little tedious to have to straighten out all your types. You know what's more tedious than that? Having to straighten out all your types, but not getting any feedback about it at compile time and having to figure it out based on mysterious failures, or if you're lucky explicit exceptions, at runtime.

Having worked for a while in Javascript, and now for a pretty short time in Typescript, I cannot imagine trying to make a decent-complexity project in pure Javascript. That I believe is why they tend to not really be all that object-oriented and pass strings around for lots of things and be sorta flaky.

[-] atheken@programming.dev 13 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

Yeah, dropping typescript and then codifying type information in jsdoc is comical.

The only thing I would say about your experience is that “dropping TS for go” is a little bit misleading, and it doesn’t really sound like it bears on the general debate of “TS vs. JS” - go and other static languages generally fit a different niche in my opinion, and can be a better option for certain kinds of systems.

If you’re building anything of even moderate complexity, or with more than one person, you really need the types and modularity that TS provides.

I guess it’s also worth noting that JS has actually been influenced/adopted some key features from TS over the years, so it’s possible to do a few things with it to make stuff that’s a bit more maintainable.

[-] mo_ztt@lemmy.world 4 points 3 years ago

Yah, 100% agree. So in my case, Typescript is actually a better fit niche-wise... but I finally reached the point where I didn't want to cope anymore with flawed things it was inheriting from Javascript, so it was especially ironic to me when I saw this and thought maybe I'm not the only one, only to discover that the message was "SIIIKE we love the flawed things! It's the improvements we're getting rid of."

I mean every project is different and they've got a right to do what they want. It was just a hilarious surprise for me.

[-] huntrss@feddit.de 4 points 3 years ago

Too be frank, it is pretty short but your summary is on-point. I would only add, that Svelte also dropped it due to the additional compile step.

However TS can still be used in most of the frameworks including Svelte.

[-] alokir@lemmy.world 8 points 3 years ago

I wonder how Svelte's code is built to make this tradeoff worth it. I've been using TS for a long time and in every project the compilation part was the shortest task in the whole build process, especially when you compare it with bundling or running unit tests.

[-] phiresky@lemmy.world 5 points 3 years ago

If that's what this video is about then it's a lie (I'm not going to watch that bait). Svelte did not move away from Typescript. Svelte just moved from TSs custom syntax to TS-in-JSDoc. They are still using the same types and TS compiler to fully enforce type checking their code.

Their reason isn't that TS is bad, just that the IDE experience is bad redirecting you to .d.ts instead of source files for libraries.

[-] huntrss@feddit.de 3 points 3 years ago

Afaik it had more to do with another layer of abstraction then with compike time.

[-] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 7 points 3 years ago

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[-] Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world 4 points 3 years ago

Nah. Waste of time imo

[-] Templa@beehaw.org 4 points 3 years ago

I never met someone that actually used Typescript in a professional setting saying they dislike it. It makes your life easier and you can still have parts of your project using regular JS.

[-] scorpionix@feddit.de 4 points 3 years ago

I haven't dealt with a larger JS/Node Project in a while, but I like this approach to using TS features in JS.

[-] cactusupyourbutt@lemmy.world 9 points 3 years ago

so he does all of this because he dislikes transpiling because supposedly it makes debugging etc harder? does he know about sourcemaps?

he also says he doesnt like type information in his code, so he adda them as comments. the type information is still there, how is this an improvement?

[-] scorpionix@feddit.de 2 points 3 years ago

The issue with transpiling is that the code that's running in production is not necessarily the one that's been tested. A source map doesn't fix that.

[-] atheken@programming.dev 6 points 3 years ago

I loathe this line of reasoning. It's like saying "unless you wrote assembly, compiling your code could change what it does."

Guess what, the CPU reorders/ellides assembly, too! You can't trust anything!

[-] pivot_root@lemmy.world 4 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

Haha, what is this, the 90s?

Assembled instructions aren't even the lowest non-hardware stage in instruction execution. There's proprietary microcode sitting a level below your typical x86 ISA.

And even then, what if—God forbid—the hardware has errata. A line has to be drawn somewhere between trusting that what you write is logically correct at all stages below it. If someone is unable to trust that the environment they wrote code for works, they better start learning how to create PCBs and writing for FPGAs.

[-] atheken@programming.dev 3 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

🙈🙉🙊

I know, but I didn’t want to scare the children.

I also chose to pretend it’s just little gnomes moving the bytes around. Less magic.

[-] pivot_root@lemmy.world 1 points 3 years ago

What are electrons, but a miserable pile of little magic gnomes? But enough talk... have a upvote!

[-] pivot_root@lemmy.world 2 points 3 years ago

Unless someone is using some language extensions, transpiling from TS to an ECMAScript module using the ESNext target merely drops the type annotations.

If not running the exact same code being developed is an issue, it's an easy fix.

[-] Miaou@jlai.lu 1 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

Ugh? Why shouldn't it be the same code?

[-] scorpionix@feddit.de 1 points 3 years ago

Because Browsers can't run Typescript, they run JavaScript. That's why the intermediate conversion step isneededd.

[-] Miaou@jlai.lu 1 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

But your tests are running on the compiled code too. Nothing can be tested but handwritten assembly, with such approach

[-] plistig@feddit.de 4 points 3 years ago

That approach was mentioned in the video.

[-] iFarmGolems@lemmy.world 4 points 3 years ago

I do this daily and believe me when I say that I'd trade my kidney for the ability to use TS natively. This looks good on paper but jsdoc notation has lots of flaws and you literally can't do some things with it. Also, it doesn't check if the function actually does the thing you described so it needs manual review every time it's changed.

[-] ComeSweetDeath@programming.dev 1 points 3 years ago

good. typescript has always caused us more headache than it worth in all my projects. I bill my clients extra for it if they make me work on it.

[+] ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de -42 points 3 years ago

Opinion from me, a JS beginner: Vanilla is good enough now. If your IDE lets you type common structures like document.getElementById("") with shortcuts, I find no need to use a framework. Also, vanilla works better in offline projects.

[-] atheken@programming.dev 27 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

This is an professional experience thing.

Types support “programming at scale” - scale in the sense of larger code based or multiple people contributing.

If you’re hacking away at a script for a web page, then yeah, have at it.

If you’re supporting more than a few hundred lines of code or working on a team, you need types to codify and communicate information that can be verified with a compiler.

Whenever you see a larger codebase that is not strongly (or statically) typed, you generally will see unit tests that are verifying the types/structure of outputs.

[-] TehPers@beehaw.org 2 points 3 years ago

As someone who has written some Python at work, whenever I need to work on some code without type hints, I spend way too much time trying to figure out what all the parameter types should be for functions. I can't be the only one doing this though, I've seen functions that assume their inputs are strings receiving pathlib.Path on some uncommon branch that sure enough errors on some obscure user inputs.

I've been pushing mypy hard though. It's not perfect, but it works well enough that it's still worth using over not using. The biggest pushback has actually been from the amount of time we'd have to spend fixing type-related bugs instead of developing new features.

[-] luxmesa@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 3 years ago

I have the same problem. Any time I use a dynamically typed language, whatever time I save not specifying the type, I’ll lose immediately when I have to hunt down what sort of data this function expects or chase down some error that a compiler would have caught in a statically typed language.

[-] Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com 27 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

How is that related to TS? Aside from the fact that your comment might have just started a civil war (no, vanilla JS is not "good enough", they created libraries for a reason) this isn't about using libraries / frameworks. It's about needing some system to handle type annotations to avoid falling in the bottomless pit of:

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property of undefined

[+] ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de -36 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

I literally don’t know what TypeScript is, lol. But the video says that Vanilla is an alternative to TS and I am a happy user of it. I thought it was some enterprise language that compiles to JavaScript for people who cannot handle document.getElementById("") but will happily add an abstraction layer on the wonky HTML-CSS-JS mess, just to have the compiler create really weird undecipherable minified JS... But I already said I'm inexperienced – don't take advice from a $ hater whose biggest working website is this.

[-] fiah@discuss.tchncs.de 30 points 3 years ago

I literally don’t know what TypeScript is

then perhaps you should learn about it before you offer your opinion

[-] Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com 18 points 3 years ago

Then I guess this is what you get for talking about something without knowing what it is lol.

As another user pointed out, TypeScript is a different language (.ts extension) that extends JavaScript, meaning JS code is valid TS code, but TS adds various language features for type checking. Your editor is then able to interpret your code according to these type structures and warn you if you are making any stupid type errors like this one:

The problem many people have with TS (such as the "big projects" mentioned by Fireship) is that sometimes you end up having code that works but still have to do some weird type gymnastics to please the TS compiler and have it remove any errors and warnings.

That being said, frameworks that "create really weird undecipherable minified JS" do have their place, as they allow you to seamlessy do things that would be either very inelegant and verbose or significantly more complex in vanilla JS, but I won't bore you with an excessively long wall of text.

PS: I love your Czech flag website. Had me jump on my chair when the music started blasting through my headphones.

[-] 520@kbin.social 5 points 3 years ago

Typescript is basically JavaScript with variable typing. That is, you have to explicitly declare that your variable is a string, int, float, etc.

[-] pjhenry1216@kbin.social 3 points 3 years ago

The summary uses the term "vanilla JS" in a weird way. It's just to further denote it's not TypeScript because TypeScript is a language that essentially extends JavaScript. It's not a framework. This is about language choice of TS vs JS inside large complex libraries only.

Libraries tend to have a need for generic typing due to the nature of being code used by other code. So you get a lot of syntax craziness involving Type parameters.

You can still use the libraries mentioned in a TS project. They're just not written in TS. TS and JS can be in the same project. Moreover, it even states this isn't about developers using TS in non-library projects.

[-] dbilitated@aussie.zone 1 points 3 years ago

it's fine to learn with. preferable even. I lead a team of devs writing/maintaining four related front-end applications and at a point you really need a better language.

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