Comment by genshii
1 day ago
Maybe this is a bit pedantic, but it bothers me when people refer to "Node" as a programming language. It's not a language, it's a JavaScript runtime. Which to that you might say "well when people say Node they just mean JavaScript". But that's also probably not accurate, because a good chunk of modern Node-executed projects are written in TypeScript, not JavaScript. So saying "Node" doesn't actually say which programming language you mean. (Also, there are so many non-Node ways to execute JavaScript/TypeScript nowadays)
Anyway, assuming you're talking about TypeScript, I'm surprised to hear that you prefer Go's type system to TypeScript's. There are definitely cases where you can get carried away with TypeScript types, but due to that expressiveness I find it much more productive than Go's type system (and I'd make the same argument for Rust vs. Go).
My intent was just to emphasize that I’m comparing Go against writing JavaScript for the Node runtime and not in the browser, that is all, but you are correct.
Regarding Typescript, I actually am a big fan of it, and I almost never write vanilla JS anymore. I feel my team uses it well and work out the kinks with code review. My primary complaint, though, is that I cannot trust any other team to do the same, and TS supports escape hatches to bypass or lie about typing.
I work on a project with a codebase shared by several other teams. Just this week I have been frustrated numerous times by explicit type assertions of variables to something they are not (`foo as Bar`). In those cases it’s worse than vanilla JS because it misleads.
Yeah, but no one is using v8 directly, even though technically you could if you wanted. Node.js is as much JavaScript as LuaJIT is Lua, or GCC compiles C.
Fair, but I think the JavaScript ecosystem is unique in that the language is very separate from the thing that executes/compiles it. When you write Go, 99.9% of the time you're writing for the Go compiler.
When you write JavaScript (or TypeScript that gets transpiled), it's not as easy to assume the target is Node (V8). It could be Bun (JavaScriptCore), Deno, a browser, etc.
it is pedantic, everyone knows what "node" means in this context
Apparently not, because I first assumed that he was talking about TypeScript considering that JavaScript doesn't have much of type system to compare to.