Comment by maze-le | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maze-le | Hacker News Reader

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Before I tried Typescript I thought it was just another JS-precompiler... been there done that. I tried Coffeescript, the Closure Compiler, even LispyScript. In the end it wasn't really that much different to plain old JS, just with some syntactic sugar.

But when I actually had to use it in a project, I instantly fell in love with it. Not only does it force me to think about the proper scope and type of a function or variable, it also helps refactoring and reading undocumented code.

Yes, sometimes it can be frustrating (meh: no typings for a legacy project, build-toolchains have to handle another layer of abstraction, etc.). But this really is peanuts compared to the hoops we had go through before.

TS has been the best thing that has happened to JS-development in the last decade.

I would say that there's no Typescript tax. Rather, there's a Javascript tax for Typescript. As in, the shortcomings of Typescript only come from Javascript. Typescript is transpiled to Javascript, so types are not enforced on execution, and that's the only real limitation of Typescript.

Usage of the word "tax" is interesting, too. I'm happy to pay tax if I reap tangible benefits from it / if the "money" is put to good use. I'd say that's the case with typescript.

What about Typescript clicked for you that didn't click with the Closure Compiler?

Hmm, its been a while since I last used it...

But I'd say it simply has a different scope: The Closure Compiler takes a subset of Javascript and creates highly optimized code. It optimizes the execution, not the development workflow.

Typescript forces you to think differently about the implementation itself. While the CC also imposes constraints on types and checks them during compilation, in the end I really just wrote Javascript (and sometimes pretty messy one).

In the end, I don't think either technology can be a substitute for code quality. But for me, with Typescript its certainly easier to produce a better coding style.

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