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Comment by MentallyRetired | Hacker News Reader

Same. Lead dev here.

Part of my problem stems from the lack of typed libraries across the JS ecosystem. Party supported typing leads to more issues, I've found.

Then there's the IDE. I don't use code hinting. In fact, I find it irritating. So, I draw no benefit from TS in this regard.

Then there's the cryptic error messages. They've gotten better over the years but I always seem to spend more time debugging TS than writing code.

And finally, I just don't run into the kinds of errors people talk about solving with TS.

That said, I did enjoy the strong typing that AS4 provided back in the day. But TS is intolerable to me and I've worked with it for years.

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As another lead/senior dev, I've found that onboarding hires that know some TS into a TS codebase is a hugely slicker process than onboarding people into a pure JS codebase, simply because the typechecker can do the overhead of having to check each call etcetera.

The issues you are having sound like teething issues but as someone who's worked with TS for years I've found they aren't hugely difficult to overcome, either with @types packages, or writing declarations, or declaring module (and having an "unsafe" library that people use with care).

> I don't use code hinting. In fact, I find it irritating.

I mean that's a personal preference, but if you're a lead dev and you have people starting work on a codebase they have little experience with, it's a godsend because they aren't totally blind.

> I mean that's a personal preference, but if you're a lead dev and you have people starting work on a codebase they have little experience with, it's a godsend because they aren't totally blind.

Very much this. I pushed to move the scripting language for our game engine project dot big bang from JS to TS primarily because the typing makes the entire codebase much more discoverable and beginner friendly. Using Monaco embedded in the browser programmers get great auto-complete and inline code documentation as well as the compilation step making some simple and common runtime errors much harder or impossible to run into. Qualitatively the mixed experience bunch we have using it now all much prefer the TS experience to the JS one we had before.

I'm learning typescript on-the-fly as I migrate an existing React+express codebase to it; Curious if you'd recommend Monaco over VS Code, and if so, why?

Monaco is the engine that powers VS Code. It’s super neat you can just embed it.

https://github.com/microsoft/monaco-editor

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