Maybe off topic but I've been wondering whether many people are finding spending time on TS worthwhile?
Given the improvements in ES6, the fact that the JS community in general is so active, and the fact that I've seen some truly awful TS code (mainly where the devs want to pretend the web doesn't exist) I've been put off exploring TS too far much (beyond looking at the basic language features).
> seen some truly awful TS code (mainly where the devs want to pretend the web doesn't exist)
I agree. Typescript is an impressive project, but most of the Typescript code I see looks more like C# or Java than Javascript. Sadly, it seems to have been created to accommodate that kind of approach.
But there's a lot to be said for strong and static typing when dealing with large projects.
That's why I'm hopeful for Flow, Facebook's new project to add static typing to Javascript:
Yeah the stuff I've seen looks to me like poorly written C# consciously written in a Web-ignorant style, thoroughly at odds with whats going on in the Web/JS community generally.
Anyway totally agree on the typing angle, navigation/refactoring/discover-ability aspects are useful and I loved the implicit interface approach in Dart. However I wonder whether some of those features won't be added to JS over time (where possible in such a dynamic language). Ta for link to flow, will give it a look thanks.
After quite some consideration I chose to convert my ActionScript3 project to TypeScript. I knew I had to move away from flash for a while, and personally I really prefer to code big framework-like projects with static typing, so I gave it a go and it I have to say it has been really enjoyable. My code looks really neat, and unlike many other comments here, my code is very much targeted at the web and bound to how js normally works. It's just more beautiful and well organised in my opinion. I've been using the WebStorm IDE and the intellisense features are really nice. Getting React to work with typescript was a bit of a hassle, but worked pretty well after some research, just not when I tried to make components that extend other components. Not sure if that will work with this React release, but being able to use plain typescript classes was certainly high on my wishlist, so this makes me really happy.
Sorry yeah wasn't meaning to infer you couldn't write beautiful Web embracing code in TS. However most of the code I've seen using TS, and admittedly its a small sample, was of the other sort so I wasn't sure if that's the way the TS community is pulling.
It's the first time I heard that, though I admit I'm not really actively involved in any type of TS community. All I've been in contact with are the TS releases and blogpost from the TS development team, for which I can only give credits (quite fast and stable development with good features), and some TS projects and definition files for existing libraries I found on github which were pretty decent and helpful. As naive as this question may be, can you tell me more about what parts of the ecosystem or which community you mean?
Ah yes, true. I've always thaught of it as understandable that they focus on Visual Studio, but I too would much appriciate it if they would push that a bit less. I did try the free version of VS when I started with TS, but I didnt prefer it to webstorm, even though in some small details, the ts support may be slightly better.
I'm just too lazy to write the tests that a type checker will do for me. It's not just laziness though it's the idea of writing all that redundant code. (Too lazy to reverse engineer typeless code too)
Given the improvements in ES6, the fact that the JS community in general is so active, and the fact that I've seen some truly awful TS code (mainly where the devs want to pretend the web doesn't exist) I've been put off exploring TS too far much (beyond looking at the basic language features).
I'm not sure if I should be rethinking though?