Was this written only to promote https://github.com/ericelliott/rtype and https://github.com/ericelliott/rfx?
They seem great. Are there any other good gradual type hinting platforms for Javascript anywhere?
They seem great. Are there any other good gradual type hinting platforms for Javascript anywhere?
Yes. Notice this is a list of only the trendiest of tooling and excludes many great and popular tools that aren't used by the cutting-edge react-webpack-flux-babel developer this post is directed towards.
The goal is the same as commercials with attractive people, associative advertising.
I gave a talk at the O'Reilly Fluent conference a while back discussing lots of the developer tooling that was available for JS a couple years ago. I wanted to gauge general awareness of the tools, so I conducted some informal audience hand-raise surveys.
I was shocked at the number of people at a JavaScript conference that weren't aware of the great JavaScript tools that I took for granted. That's why I wrote the article.
I think there's a lot of value in a general ecosystem overview. What kinds of tools are there, what are the tools like? Are there interesting future trends to make note of?
I think raising awareness of the overall ecosystem is valuable.
The only reason I even mentioned rtype and rfx is because I'm not satisfied with the type tooling available for JavaScript right now. Flow and TypeScript are supersets of JS, so to really embrace those, you have to step away from the standard - something I'm not willing to do at that level.
JSDoc is not live code at all, and it easily falls out of sync with your source. It's also awkwardly verbose, and only loosely JavaScript based (essentially copied from Javadoc).
React users have React.PropTypes, which is pretty cool, but too React-specific and also awkwardly verbose. I am working on rtype/rfx to fill a void in this department.
If there was anything I believe to be better, I'd happily link to that, instead. =)