Me, who’s not in web dev:
Web development needs a whole lot of change and these kinds of fights are meaningless indeed.
I’d rather stay out of the frontend all together but I’d rather chop my balls off than go back to JS.
Plot twist: You are transgender and love working with JS
I’m idealistically/philosophically committed to a Purescript Halogen front end with a Haskell Servant backend, biatch. Maybe someday I’ll get WASM in there. One thing I will not do is use TS or JS.
What Typescript drama is there? It’s fantastic. It’s been an industry standard for years. In my anecdotal experience the only people that hate it are juniors who did pure JS at their bootcamp and seniors that have refused to learn anything for the last 5 years.
DHH (guy who founded Ruby on Rails) ripped typescript out of a supporting library and swapped it for JavaScript. He did it in his typical fashion of not allowing discussion and being a dick (PR only open for a couple hours and then merged disregarding all the negative feedback about the change) . So people are mad at him again.
He does stupid shit like this all the time because he’s a fucking knob.
RoR will always have a special place in my heart, but yeah… DHH sure does have opinions. What possible justification is there for removing it when it’s already there? Guess someone could just shift the types out to DT.
Edit: So I read his blog post about it. He’s dropping it because he just doesn’t like it and he’s allowed to not like it. Okay then 🤷
His blog to me sounds like he did it because it was too difficult for him to understand a few errors. Says it all.
From his blog post:
While you may compile dialects into it, you still have to accept the fact that running code in the browser means running JavaScript. So being able to write that, free of any tooling, and free of any strong typing, is a blessing under the circumstances.
By his logic, JS linters are bad because they’re tooling that restricts your access to all of Javascript. But linters mean you don’t have to read PRs with a fine tooth comb to make sure there’s no footguns like using == instead of ===.
Also, you could use that same logic to advocate for writing JVM bytecode directly instead of Java/Kotlin/Scala/Clojure/etc.
The question is really whether tooling pays its way in terms of lower bug rates, code that’s easier for coworkers to read, and code that’s easier to reason about.
