Comment by teaearlgraycold
Comment by teaearlgraycold 2 days ago
I maintain that TypeScript is probably the best language you’ll be able to get paid to write.
Comment by teaearlgraycold 2 days ago
I maintain that TypeScript is probably the best language you’ll be able to get paid to write.
I wouldn’t blame TS for not fixing the JS standard library. It’s just a type system.
Normally, I would agree with you, but if you are going to say it’s the best language, then the criticism is fair.
Best language would be the entire ecosystem, including standard library
As of the last couple years, you're probably not wrong. Basically every open role right now requires TypeScript, Node, Next.JS, etc.
Meh, I used to have that feeling, especially when discovering fp-ts and then effect (neither of which I've been paid to write), but after about four years, I'm tired of writing it period. The standard library for node is horrible; the ecosystem is okay but not great. And I don't even care for effect anymore. I also write go in my job and it's just okay, but the standard library is much better.
I've been playing around with rust in my free time and like it. I think it's a good FP middle ground. Gleam also looks interesting. But to your point I imagine there aren't many jobs paying for rust and practically none for Gleam.
I believe Fly.io deploys some Gleam in prod. I tried playing with Gleam for a bit, but I got stuck trying to make the Actor Model make sense. It’s Gleam’s solution to mutable state, inherited from Erlang and the BEAM. It takes so much code just to emulate a simple, mutable Map. I liked Rust’s middle ground with `mut` in function defs.
I’m personally strongly opposed to using any library that becomes a new primitive of my project. I’m fine with an intrusive framework, but never a fundamental change to how plain-old business logic is written. That means fp-ts is out. However stuff like JS’s Date can be replaced under these rules - these days perhaps with a Temporal polyfill.
If you like one, you’ll prolly like the other
Hell you might even like ActionScript ;P
C# is nominally typed, which, in practice, leads to safer code and less type gymnastics. Of course you can avoid the type gymnastics with "any", then you you're sacrificing safety.
If you like TypeScript and C#, then you'll probably also like Delphi and Turbo Pascal!
They were all written by the same guy, Anders Hejlsberg:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19568681
"My favorite is always the billion dollar mistake of having null in the language. And since JavaScript has both null and undefined, it's the two billion dollar mistake." -Anders Hejlsberg
"It is by far the most problematic part of language design. And it's a single value that -- ha ha ha ha -- that if only that wasn't there, imagine all the problems we wouldn't have, right? If type systems were designed that way. And some type systems are, and some type systems are getting there, but boy, trying to retrofit that on top of a type system that has null in the first place is quite an undertaking." -Anders Hejlsberg
> "My favorite is always the billion dollar mistake of having null in the language. And since JavaScript has both null and undefined, it's the two billion dollar mistake."
> -Anders Hejlsberg
With signed ints it even leads to symmetric ranges in the negative and positive directions.
Delphi has been dead for 10+ years. Nobody uses it except for a few legacy applications and licenses cost $1200+.
You're kind of missing the point. Turbo Pascal has been dead for a lot longer. Or is it?
The point is that TypeScript and C# are extremely similar for a good reason, not a coincidence, and that Anders Hejlsberg knows what the fuck he's doing and talking about, and has been implementing amazing groundbreaking well designed languages and IDEs for a very long time. Turbo Pascal was so great it flummoxed Bill Gates, so Microsoft sent a limo to recruit and hire Anders Hejlsberg from Borland, then he made Visual J++, Windows Foundation Classes, C#, and TypeScript.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal
>Scott MacGregor of Microsoft said that Bill Gates "couldn't understand why our stuff was so slow" compared to Turbo Pascal. "He would bring in poor Greg Whitten [programming director of Microsoft languages] and yell at him for half an hour" because their company was unable to defeat Kahn's small startup, MacGregor recalled.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8664370
>"According to the suit, Microsoft also offered Mr. Hejlsberg a $1.5 million signing bonus, a base salary of $150,000 to $200,000 and options for 75,000 shares of Microsoft stock. After Borland's counteroffer last October, Microsoft offered another $1.5 million bonus, the complaint says."
Agree. While people argue and split hairs over X language is better than Y language (noobs if I’m being honest, even if they have 20 yr experience), one can ship actual products and make money using TS.
It’s a good language that scales quite well to the point where you can then extract specific parts to more performant languages.
99.9% of people won’t have that problem, so I think they should just use TS and solve problems.
Anyone else can be safely ignored and they can complain in the corner.
I'd love to disagree, but every other language's ergonomics just seem so clunky or too magic, whereas with TS and the standard web APIs you have so much room to code how you see fit. Sure, I'd rather a LISP for purity but I'm a realist. If only Brandon Eich had really gotten his way, we'd have Scheme.
People may forget what you did, but they'll remember how you made them feel. It's been years since I've used TS, but I remember it failing to solve about half the problems that I had with JS. I think they did the best they could given the constraints though.
This article is a good example. TS can't fix the underlying APIs, standard library etc.