I was talking to my manager the other day, discussing the languages we are using at $dayjob. He kind of offhandedly said that he thinks TypeScript is a temporary fad and soon everything will go back to using JavaScript. He doesn’t like that it’s made by Microsoft either.

I’m not a frontend developer so I don’t really know, but my general impression is that everything is moving more and more towards TypeScript, not away from it. But maybe I’m wrong?

Does anyone who actually works with TypeScript have any impression about this?

  • eraticEnglish
    72·
    3 months ago

    Personally I’d rather use JSDoc in my own projects for type annotations and call it a day. I find TS a bit annoying but that might be because I’m not that familiar with it.

    • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
      61·
      3 months ago

      That’s just Typescript with extra steps.

      Though I have also done this once or twice for single-file projects where I didn’t want to deal with actually running tsc. It has some annoying downsides though, e.g. you don’t get to have a tsconfig.json and the syntax sucks.

      Microsoft had a proposal to allow TS annotations in JavaScript which would have been awesome and fixed the syntax issue.

      Looks like it was discussed a year ago and hasn’t really made much progress. Seems like lots of people wanting to shoehorn runtime type checking onto it.

      • eraticEnglish
        4·
        3 months ago

        Is it? I just have it auto-generate in my IDE with snippets. If I was using TS I would still document using TSDoc anyway. You can use jsconfig.json instead.

        • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
          1·
          3 months ago

          If I was using TS I would still document using TSDoc anyway.

          Yeah but you wouldn’t put the types there. Putting types in JSDoc is awkward.

          You can use jsconfig.json instead.

          Unfortunately not. I even went as far as reading the source code for VSCode. There’s no way to e.g. set noUncheckedIndexedAccess.