So, yes, it’s generally better than JS, but it doesn’t actually make it good/attractive, if you’re used to the sanity of backend languages. It very much feels like lipstick on a pig.
Exactly this. I’d rather use TypeScript than regular JS, but I enjoy using almost any other statically-typed language more (except maybe C++) because TS has the potential to be just as bad as JS for codebases where it isn’t being used correctly (this is true for other languages as well but it’s usually a lot more obvious).
Not that it isn’t possible to have good typescript code, but rather that code becomes a lot harder to maintain because of problems that could’ve been prevented at a language level (truthy/falsey logic, ‘any’ type being allowed by default rather than ‘unknown,’ etc)
I imagine what they mean is e.g. that TypeScript can tell you something is a
Date, but it doesn’t attempt to fix some of the confusing, quirky behaviour with that: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Date#interpretation_of_two-digit_yearsSo, yes, it’s generally better than JS, but it doesn’t actually make it good/attractive, if you’re used to the sanity of backend languages. It very much feels like lipstick on a pig.
Exactly this. I’d rather use TypeScript than regular JS, but I enjoy using almost any other statically-typed language more (except maybe C++) because TS has the potential to be just as bad as JS for codebases where it isn’t being used correctly (this is true for other languages as well but it’s usually a lot more obvious).
Not that it isn’t possible to have good typescript code, but rather that code becomes a lot harder to maintain because of problems that could’ve been prevented at a language level (truthy/falsey logic, ‘any’ type being allowed by default rather than ‘unknown,’ etc)