Hacker News Reader

Comment by technion | Hacker News Reader

I didn't mind the coffeescript experience, but it's deeply hurtful to productivity to dev in a platform that doesn't end up winning.

View on HN

Yeah, I like a lot of the language features here, especially:

- Everything is an expression

- Pattern matching

- Spread in any position

- Dedented strings/templates

However, I wouldn't use it, because the chance of it becoming abandonware that I just have to migrate off of later is way too high. I'll write a few extra TypeScript characters here and there for the stability.

Unless civet's compiled output is hard to read you could always just check in the compiled Typescript source and continue from there if it gets abandoned. Not much of a risk when the migration is built in by the way the tool works in normal use.

The compiled output seems pretty clean, but isn’t necessarily what you’d write by hand. e.g. adds things like anonymous functions called immediately, when you’d probably just write a named private function, that sort of thing.

CoffeeScript did end up winning though, all of its important features ended up in the next Javascript spec. It was a bit sad to transition into the slightly less aesthetic next Javascript release, but it also felt triumphant. To me it feels like the CoffeeScript community won. Every time I type some Javascript that's actually not fragile and not absolute garbage, I remember it's because we as a community backed CoffeeScript, and that led to the browsers listening and adding its features to Javascript.

I am certain we're doing the same thing now with Typescript.

Is it? I find most of the "winning" tech deeply unproductive. Have you tried developing in a project with Webpack and Redux? It's kind of its own little hell. Everything is way too slow and complicated. Tasks that should take 20 minutes take 3 hours.

“Winning tech” may be less productive for a one-off single person project.

But “losing tech” is unproductive when you have to maintain/upgrade your code over many years and onboard new developers into the team.

It is unfortunate that the tech industry’s choice of tools is largely fashion-driven but that is the reality.

The problem is, the entirety of the javascript ecosystem is built for large teams doing multi-year enterprise projects, and so unless you're launching a social media startup or something, you have to wade through a swamp of unnecessary complexity.

Try again with Vite and useReducer and prepare to have your socks blown off.

Even vite is slow. Just use esbuild directly. Jotai is much better for global state management.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com