I was talking to my manager the other day, discussing the languages we are using at $dayjob. He kind of offhandedly said that he thinks TypeScript is a temporary fad and soon everything will go back to using JavaScript. He doesn’t like that it’s made by Microsoft either.
I’m not a frontend developer so I don’t really know, but my general impression is that everything is moving more and more towards TypeScript, not away from it. But maybe I’m wrong?
Does anyone who actually works with TypeScript have any impression about this?
I don’t see it dying from my perspective. Its only been getting better and better. The only thing I could see displacing it in my org is maybe Rust due to WASM proving a transition path.
We use TS on the back end to leverage our teams existing skill set and libraries we’ve built up.
I know it’s a meme to use “the next best thing” in the ecosystem, but we’ve been really happy with the newish Effect library + Bun runtime. Effect is like a merger of the older fp-ts/io-ts libraries (same author works on both) with Zio from the Scala ecosystem. It vastly simplifies the former and the new stuff with dependency injection and defect management is refreshing. With the Bun runtime, we see a 15x faster startup time (great for dev). Its halved the RAM requirements in prod. We don’t even need to transpile… We still do for prod to tree-shake dev-only code to ensure its not available in prod, but deploying to dev is FAST.
20 years into the future, once WASM has been widely adopted, a browser within a browser will have been created, with its own equivalent javascript, which will then lead developers to create a WASM equivalent for a web browser running in a WASM browser, running on a bloated OS.
I know you said this, but I’m still curious why not just something like Go, which I was able to basically learn in 3 days- just coming from a mostly JS and C++ background
As a Go dev, its simplicity is arguably taken too far. For example there are no union types or proper enums
Yeah. I started as a C++ dev, fell in love with Go, then ended up on Rust.
Felt like a nice middle ground of “It’s got the types I need, but it feels good to dev on”
I really did enjoy using go for smaller projects though, would do so again.
That’s fair, I know they’re actively rejecting inheritance, but I wish you could make like a prototype. Like say, a function can take a struct with these fields. Which yeah an interface can do but is much more clunky
I’m coming from a Haskell/Scala background. This job just pays more. TS has been “good enough” for types. I don’t think I could be as effective without them at this point.