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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

Why go to the effort of doing all of this, but not use typescript? I don't see the point - they mention ignoring the build step, but it's not like that is particularly annoying at the moment, at least not in the largish-projects I've worked on (enterprise angular apps staffed by approx 50-60 frontend engineers, so fairly chunky codebase)

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Most apps are not staffed by 50-60 frontend engineers, so simplifying for solo devs (which is by definition the majority of developers) is worthwhile.

Most applications are certainly not staffed by large teams, but the advantages would be best seen in large codebases. Most solo developers are working on much smaller TypeScript codebases, and won't experience many issues with the build system.

TypeScript is the main language that I program in every day, and I don't see the advantages of this proposal outweighing the disadvantages.

I would think the opposite. Solo devs are in the most flexible state and they don't care if they need to go through a bit of inconvenience for a slight boon to code quality but say you got several average devs who can only be taught on how to do these things, it gets annoying to set it all up and make sure nothing breaks or you'll be wasting time babysitting their environment.

> they don't care if

Bold to speak for the group of devs likely to have the most variety. Personally I hate twiddling with build systems and will happily write worse code to avoid it so what I do know.

On my solo projects, I never care about JavaScript build infrastructure, it is all pure vanilaJS.

It feels so liberating not having to deal with the usual mess of JavaScript toolchains.

Indeed. In fact, I wouldn’t mind if the build step were made mandatory, with the form of the code that browsers interpret decoupled from the one that programmers write, so that the former may evolve at a much slower rate without constraining developers too much.

Of course, that would defeat the whole purpose of the ever-continuing TC39 standardization process, so it’s not going to happen.

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