TypeScript is now officially 10 years old

I was unsure of Typescript at first, but it has become an absolute joy and absolute pleasure to develop in.<p>I was reluctant to introduce a build step (having got used to the simple refresh cycle of a browser plus vanilla javascript) but I am pleased to say that this is a bit of a non-issue now with modern tooling like esbuild et al.<p>I still avoid NPM like the absolute plague, but the good news is that tooling like Deno have made typescript first server-side development in the ECMAScript world a total joy.<p>I&#x27;ve said it before - it&#x27;s like floating through the air. So serene, so expressive. A true joy.

Typescript was my stepping stone into the world of Rust.<p>Even before Deno made it easy, it was straightforward enough to configure a simple tsconfig and just run tsc. Much like cargo, there is a lot to be said for &quot;it just works&quot; tooling - especially for beginners or even new programmers.<p>It is probably fair to say it is one of the most influential and impactful languages of all time. There&#x27;s even the future possibility of much of its type syntax being absorbed back into JavaScript: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tc39&#x2F;proposal-type-annotations" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tc39&#x2F;proposal-type-annotations</a>

I feel like I am the only one in the world not liking typescript. It is not that I don&#x27;t like types, it is what those types do to the readability of the codebase in terms of verbosity. My original programming language was Java but I switched to Node.js because I liked the simplicity of the code written in it. Nowadays every Javascript project seems worse than a Java project in terms of verbosity.<p>My main gripe with projects becoming verbose is that the code becomes hard to understand at a glance. Functions that usually could be 10 lines are now 15 lines becomes of the formatter and each line looks more gibberish because everything has a type. You have to manually filter out that noise. The best way I can describe it is that entropy is increased in order to get type safety.

&gt;TypeScript never set out to build a separate, distinct, and prescriptive language. Instead, TypeScript had to be descriptive.<p>Sadly, the majority of people writing Typescript rarely care about descriptive and readable code these days. Somehow the focus shifted from using types to better understand complex systems through the <i>code itself</i>, to writing whatever polymorphic union type abomination that yields the best IntelliSense auto-completion in VSCode.

Thank you, Anders Hejlsberg. As a newbie in front-end development, I am grateful to TypeScript (and its integration with VSCode) for taming the dynamic beast and keeping me and my codebases sane. The pragmatic design and composable nature of TS help it fit easily within the JS ecosystem, and the productivity boon helps it survive in that tumultuous landscape.

The post mentions one of the most important factors in TypeScript’s adoption: it launched, from the start, with good tooling.

I wish Flow, Facebook’s TypeScript, was more popular, as I think it has some better properties.<p>But yeah, the tooling is kind of bad and it is all written in OCaml, while TypeScript is in TypeScript…

Typescript is for big project and team collaboration. JS is still my choice for personal or small project. Fast!

At the time, the turning point that finally made me switch from Flow to TS was when it added the JSdoc mode that allows you to have VSCode intellisense without a compile step.

Any survivors of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.typescriptlang.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;handbook&#x2F;esm-node.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.typescriptlang.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;handbook&#x2F;esm-node.html</a> wanna share their experiences?

As a C++&#x2F;C#&#x2F;Java developer I just couldn&#x27;t deal with Javascript. Since discovering TS its fast becoming my favorite language. I think I might even use in the back end going forward.

Brace yourself, a new trend is near.

I wouldn&#x27;t have bet on it.<p>When it came out alongside Dart, I thought Dart to be the better, cleaner solution. After all, Google created V8.<p>Microsoft and Hejlsberg didn&#x27;t seem well suited to tackle something so lightweight as JS. The whole .net suite seemed like an overengineeres mess to me and MS wasn&#x27;t liked after the IE6 incident.<p>But on recent years I came to like TypeScript. It really is just JS.

It&#x27;s a great language. I find it jarring to go back to regular JavaScript codebases after working in TypeScript for a bit now.

I have a rather funny story about Typescript from ~4 years ago. I joined a team that had, amongst other things, an Node-Express.js and React-redux stack, all in vanilla Javascript.<p>I was a bit younger and bolder then; I lamented with the lead developer about how vanilla JS was probably not a good idea for what was to be a large enterprise platform. The response I got back was probably what you would expect from a senior developer receiving criticism from a rather newly minted developer: <i>Oh i&#x27;ve tried Typescript, but it&#x27;s just SO VERBOSE. I feel like I can&#x27;t get ANYTHING done</i>, etc. etc. etc.<p>I&#x27;ve personally been all in on TS from close to day one - around 2013 when I started some very early web development (hooray for the AngularJS&#x2F;Angular days! &#x2F;s). It somewhat scratches my ego and has been rather interesting to see the developer mindset change, particularly that of vanilla JS developers of old. Response like ones I had have gone from often negative, complaining about verbosity and I guess frustration with anything different from what they are used to, to overwhelmingly positive. Old guards join us, or fade away, I suppose.

<p><pre><code> sed s&#x2F;vanilla&#x2F;pure&#x2F;g </code></pre> (my wish for what we call javascript itself)

TS on frontend feels like devs making their editor choice (VScode) a hard dependancy

So what is the best book (under 250 pages!) to learn TS?

And still useless if you are at least half decent in js.

Wanted to try it, proceeded to install it with npm and it was incredibly scary, both the amount of stuff it pulled in and various warnings. No thanks, I&#x27;ll stay with languages with more self-contained compiler.