Comment by shadowgovt
2 days ago
I think in the case of TS, it's more that JavaScript itself is notoriously trash (I'm not being subjective; see https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat), and TypeScript helps paper over like 90% of the holes in JavaScript.
Python typed or untyped feels like a taste / flexibility / prototyping tradeoff; TypeScript vs. JavaScript feels like "Do you want to get work done or do you want to wrap barbed wire around your ankle and pull?" And I say this as someone who will happily grab JS sometimes (for <1,000 LOC projects that I don't plan to maintain indefinitely or share with other people).
Plus, TypeScript isn't a strict superset of JavaScript, so choice at the beginning matters; if you start in JS and decide to use TS later, you're going to have to port your code.
Typed Python vs untyped Python is literally the same as TS vs JS, don't let others fool you into thinking somehow it's different.
> TypeScript helps paper over like 90% of the holes in JavaScript
Always kind of baffles me when people say this, how are you actually programming where 90% of the errors/bugs you have are related to types and other things TS addresses? I must be doing something very different when writing JS because while those things happen sometime (once or twice a year maybe?), 90% of the issues I have while programming are domain/logic bugs, and wouldn't be solved by TS in any way.
I mean, I'm one of the fools who would fool you into thinking it's different, since I use all four languages. ;)
I can just skip the mypy run if I want to do untyped Python. I can't skip adding types if I'm writing TypeScript in most contexts; it's not valid TypeScript syntax. Conversely, I can't add types to JavaScript; it's not valid JavaScript syntax (jsdoc tags and running a static checker over that being a different subject, and more akin to the Python situation).
> how are you actually programming where 90% of the errors/bugs you have are related to types and other things TS addresses
It's the things in the "wat" video. JavaScript, in general, errs on the side of giving you some answer when you try and do something very unusual with types (like add a boolean to a number or a string to an array) over taking a runtime error. TypeScript will fail to typecheck in most of the places where those operations are techincally correct but surprising as hell in the wrong way unless you explicitly coerce the types to match up.
> It's the things in the "wat" video.
It's a funny video, still after 15 years of seeing it, I'll give you that. But the number of times I'm bothered by accidentally triggering those scenarios in real-life? Could probably count that on one hand.
I also give you that TypeScript helps beginner JavaScript developers a ton, and that's no easy feat by itself, just because of those things you mention. Once you build up intuition about how things work in JavaScript though, those sort of bugs should stop happening though, otherwise I'd say you aren't really learning the language.