Hacker News Reader

Comment by Roboprog | Hacker News Reader

Great comment. I am part of the minority that is dreading being forced to use Typescript some day, at least until they come up with a solution to annotate partial function application and the like.

TS solves problems I don’t have, and promotes a style I don’t want. I don’t want thousands of global symbols in hundreds of files in my project. At least TS has the decency to infer types in some cases, or at least put the type clutter after an identifier instead of before it, but it’s usually only superfluous clutter to me personally.

I realize that many people like TS. I just hope they understand why some of us are less enthusiastic.

View on HN

> annotate partial function application

I think you mean currying, right? It's been supported at close to the same level as Haskell for 3+ years[1].

> TS solves problems I don’t have

To me, it solves: 1) devs getting lazy on a team, 2) catching my mistakes before runtime, 3) correctly using library APIs, and 4) refactoring.

All of these might be low-value to you, though. I think #4 is the biggest time-saver because it enables automated refactoring (through the IDE) that isn't possible with plain JS.

> I don’t want thousands of global symbols in hundreds of files in my project.

I'm curious what you mean by this. Are you saying that TypeScript creates global symbols that weren't there before?

You can configure TypeScript so that it doesn't have any symbols from outside your project at all. For example, you can set it to import the types found in Node or on the web, or you can just skip them.

1. https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/typescript-curry-ramda-typ...

Yes, implicit currying where supplying the final arg actually calls the underlying function is one kind of partial function application. Ramda is one thing I use.

I also use an in-house library to explicitly apply arguments to return a a new function, which allows you to produce 0 arity or variadic functions.

I’m glad somebody has a work around for using Ramda in TS, but it looks every bit as “fun” as generics in Java, which I think have wasted more of my time than they have ever saved.

> Partial function application

Do you mean like curried functions?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com