A few days ago, David Heinemeier Hansson
announced
that Turbo 8
is dropping TypeScript
. I'm okay with that because I don't even know what Turbo 8 is. However, over the past few years, some frontend programmers have tried to sell me the idea that "TypeScript is useless, just use tests". I thi...
Because at the end of the day TypeScript is still Javascript and it's still bad. Just has some verbose formats to try and make weakly typed language (javascript) appear to be strongly typed. It adds more build steps to what shouldn't be there; build steps make sense for apps, they make much less sense for libraries.
I wrote some TypeScript modules to process a bunch of documentation in markdown to a ton of output formats via pandoc + latex.
No real reason for it, except that I was able to start with the export module of a node-based thing written in JavaScript and iterate from there until I had a working system in CI/CD.
Writing code that can’t be scientifically proven to be correct on all hardware it might run on means you don’t care about code quality. /s
The Internet is full of people with a bloated ego trying to justify their opinion and gatekeeping others.
I see this more and more in software as well.
Not sure if it’s always been like this, or if I just notice it more.
Same way there’s thousands of people giving you a guide to write a task list in , but as soon as you want to use anything slightly more complex than what you can learn from working a few hours with something you quickly run out of material and is usually left to fend for yourself.
WASM allows arbitrary code execution in an environment that doesn't include the DOM... however it can communicate with the page where the DOM is available, and it's trivial to setup an abstraction layer that gives you the full suite of DOM manipulation tools in your WASM space. Libraries for WASM development generally provide that for you.
For example here's SwiftWASM:
let document = JSObject.global.document
var divElement = document.createElement("div")
divElement.innerText = "Hello, world"
_ = document.body.appendChild(divElement)
It's pretty much exactly the same as JavaScript, except you nee to use JSObject to access the document class (Swift can do globals, but they are generally avoided) and swift also presents a compiler warning if you execute a function (like appendChild) without doing anything with the result. Assigning it to a dummy "underscore" variable is the operator in Swift to tell the compiler you don't want the output.
Expect to see more posts like this. With a few projects announcing they're dropping support for TypeScript we're going to have developers worrying that this tech that they've sunk so much time into is suddenly becoming obsolete, so they're going to evangelise hard in favour of it as a defence strategy. Same thing happened when Perl went out of flavour.
I said a few, friend 😛 I agree it's not a big deal, but for developers that are totally entrenched in that ecosystem it might be alarming. Hence OP's post.
I've seen so many front-end libraries come and go over the 25 years I've been doing this. Be good at programming in general, and you can usually hop on board the incoming train pretty easily and hop off again before it goes off a cliff. You can't really get too attached to anything in an ever changing industry.
Man there have been hot take after hot take in the programming communities over the past few days. Here, I'll give my hot take since nobody asked:
If I have to touch your code and I can't tell what inputs it's supposed to accept, what it should do with those inputs, and what outputs it should produce, I'm probably deleting your code and rewriting it from scratch. Same goes for if I can trivially produce inputs or states that break it. If your code is buggy, it's getting fixed, even if that takes a rewrite.
When working with others, write readable and maintainable code that someone with much less context than you can pick up and work on. It really doesn't matter if you need to use TypeScript, mypy, tabs, doc comments, or whatever to do it.
When doing your own project, it doesn't matter. It's your code, and if you can't understand it when you come back to it then you'll probably rewrite it into something better anyway.
Reading the responses here, why are people so mad about types? Maybe I'm biased coming from a background of statically typed languages and mathematics. I'd rather have a good typing system that makes me think about data than just hoping I've thought about a problem right.
I'm half joking, but the problem with typescript is that it's JavaScript with types. The industry needs to stop retrofitting types to dynamically typed languages. The type system is an intrinsic part of the language design and if you're going to have it, it should be there from day 1. Being dynamically typed wasn't a language bug. It is a feature designed for a certain class of problem. I'm sure 90% of proponents only want it so they get better completion in their IDE, but I personally think it makes a lot of code far more difficult to read.
I have valid criticisms of statically typed languages, based around code patterns that are both expressive and efficient that are either difficult or impossible to implement in a statically typed language without "an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
Typescript, however, is different. Its type annotation functionality is not the same as a static type system, which means I get to keep all those things I like about dynamically typed languages while still having compile-time validation.
Flip-side, however, is the complete lack of runtime validation in typescript, and the fact that junior developers trip on that a lot. I would call that a real advantage of javascript (if not enough to stop me from using Typescript). Having no check at all is better than being convinced typescript is protecting you when it's not.
100% agree. Typescript is just a bandaid on top of a broken language. Sure it's better than bleeding, but it'd be preferable not to get injured in the first place.
After having to use TypeScript in a project, I don't see much usefulness. It feels more like a weird linter, than an actual language with extra features. It's tons of ugly boilerplate for little gain, at least so far in my experience.
I think vzq's point is that you can write good, readable code that doesn't do what the user wants. Same with other metrics that are ripe for navel-gazing like code coverage.
It's bordering on a false dichotomy... but I also believe that dynamic, untyped languages have proven exceptionally useful for rapid prototyping and iteration.
maintainability is arguably not a value-added for the end user. But still absolutely important. Robustness of code is arguably not visible to an end-user, until it fails. And that's very important. Features are great, but quality is still important and is basically the mortar between the bricks that are features. Only caring about features leads to poorly written applications.
The idea behind Turbo is your server sends HTML/CSS to the client, and when the content needs to be updated... the server simply sends new HTML which Turbo will inject into the page. You can also annotate links so they fetch new content from the server instead of navigating to a new URL.
Your server side code can be written in whatever language you prefer... Turbo being a 37Signals project I assume they're using Ruby. It'd work fine with TypeScript too if that's your thing. Turbo just uses HTTP / JSON to talk to the server and doesn't have a server side component.
You can have client side code, but AFAIK there's pretty minimal interaction with Turbo - you might for example add an event listener that processes the HTML and as converts ISO date/times into Date.toLocaleString().
If you're writing complex client side code then you shouldn't be using Turbo at all.
This change doesn't affect, at all, the language used by users of Turbo. What's changed is the Turbo dev team themselves have chosen to write Turbo in vanilla javascript. And there are advantages to vanilla JS - it removes the compilation step from one language to another, for example.
And there are advantages to vanilla JS - it removes the compilation step from one language to another
IDK about the potency of the pc they used to compile but... it takes less than 10 seconds usually, booting up the testing server with the updated code though CI/CD takes much longer. it's not abouthte compilation step, that's a non-issue, it's about the extra effort they don't want to put to do the typing.
I prefer strong static typing for the most part. I find it difficult to mentally model code when it's not clear what exactly is being passed to functions and whatnot. Can also use them to help ensure code correctness. TypeScript has been a welcome addition to my projects over the years and honestly I want them to implement more functionality like pattern matching expressions.
Or a signal that you'd rather not support the worst way to introduce type systems to frontend dev. While I'm not sure that applies to DHH, I am sure there are other devs that understand compromising all your goals to codepend on Node or even JS itself isn't that much of a win and rather see support for better options.