Re:The Great CoffeeScript to Typescript Migration of 2017
by momokoko on Saturday May 16, 2020 @02:44AM
(#23201025)
After ten years of JavaScript and after working on TypeScript apps that have now been around for 5+ years, I can assure you TypeScript is less maintainable long term than most languages.
Did you know that TypeScript’s type system is turing complete? Good luck figuring out literal bespoke type frameworks in TypeScript. Did you know you can have a TypeScript application that takes more than 8GB of memory to compile?
TypeScript is literally a Microsoft play to regain Visual Studio market share they lost by creating a language that much like C# and Java, practically speaking, requires a massive feature rich IDE for most developers to write software efficiently with.
You all fell for it, and at this point it’s too late. Millions of extra development hours will wasted maintaining legacy TypeScript apps for years due to a Microsoft marketing stroke of genius.
Readability of types can become an issue over time, but with the right naming of interfaces and useful type aliases, that can be mitigated to some extent. And as the typescript language and community evolve together, there are new ways to make some types even more readable - I've seen generics for getting the return type of a function, which seems potentially really useful (and some people swear by; I haven't used them extensively, but it looks like a promising idea).