I disagree. TypeScript is JavaScript plus type annotations. A team can move from JavaScript to TypeScript and see easy wins with little friction (barring my personal pet peeve, the difficulty of applying types to idiomatic React). I think you are including more about your specific situation in your analysis than is easy to parse out, like your role within a larger organization and the number of different technologies you are working with.
That is very fair. However you are disagreeing with something I stated was my very humble opinion. I didn't mean for it to be an analysis. More of a story shared at a pub as to why I don't fish off a particular pier anymore.
Thanks for the input. Reminds me a little of Xamarin. Sounds really appealing but in the end you are often better off going native.
Yup. Xamarin is another tool I want to love. I'm also following the Blazor project (https://github.com/aspnet/Blazor) like it's my job.
Could you please expand on your Xamarin vs. native comment? I’m assuming you aren’t referring to Xamarin.Forms.
Our mobile team was working on creating an app a while ago. We are all C# coders so the obvious solution seemed Xamarin because you can use C# plus you get multi platform. First they dumped Forms and went with a native UI. Then there were a ton of bugs (don't know the details) in Xamarin that caused them to switch to Java on Android. The iOS version will probably be written in Swift. Noone is talking about Xamarin anymore.
> Then there were a ton of bugs (don't know the details) in Xamarin that caused them to switch to Java on Android.
Interesting. Those are the type of day-to-day details that I'm curious about when I see cross platform solutions like Xamarin, Kotlin Native, or React Native.
The front end world is a land of sand castles. If you put in the work and care to make yours wonderful then I'm sure there is a sense of pride and accomplishment at what can be done with the tools.
However, the tide will come in and it feels like it comes in daily to threaten to wash away all of your work. You do not control the tide.
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By the above I mean that you will need to fully own the application life cycle management and realize that for as great as Typescript is virtually _none_ of the examples you see will be based in it and there will always be some level of disconnect between what you are doing and what most everyone else is doing.
I think Typescript is a great fit _if_:
a) You ship a part of the project that _only_ has to interface with your TS code post compilation/transpiling. For example a little proxy shim responsible for server round trips or the business logic that the front end devs will call.
b) You are using Angular.
Otherwise use whatever the core framework you adopt is using. Usually just ES6 + Babel + a nice linter + tests.
Hope that helps. I'm a C# dev and I've tried and failed to use TypeScript for years. Mainly because the buy in is usually for React/Vue/etc and the JS front end land is squirrely enough without my having to mentally translate every example I see into TS. I've come to terms with doing one mental switch during my day between logical tiers (front end, middleware, backend). I try to limit the additional context switching I have to do once in those spaces.
Hope that helps.