Me, who's not in web dev:

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.

I'm choosing the third side: WebAssembly

vanilla javascript? what are you, fucking Amish?

I'd rather stay out of the frontend all together but I'd rather chop my balls off than go back to JS.

TypeScript of course. The compiler often times catches mistakes in variable names, API methods, whatever. So it saves time by not having to run the whole application all the time. Also the input help is much better, when the editor knows sth is a string or a number, for example.

Honestly, as a mainly backend dev wanting to do more full stack, webdev is frustratingly intimidating. I keep trying to look up best practices but there's so little in the way of consensus. "Use JQuery, no use Vue! React is better, but also React is clunky and bad. Write pure js, no don't that's a waste of time, at least use typescript." It's all such a mess and I spend so long trying to figure out what to use. I'm trying to just pick something and stick with it, but I keep worrying that I'm not doing things the best way.

Typescript is great for catching long standing bugs in old legacy JS.

Me: 2024 is finally going to be the year of WASM, boys!

I dunno, Typescript can be nice at times but it always feels like I'm bolting on something that doesn't belong on top.

I'll still use it for now. Not sure JSDoc is as adequate for an enterprise app for me. I know Svelte and stuff do, but I'll wait and see.

I think there's a positive coming from this competition, though. Apparently this infighting has re-lit the want for type annotations to be embedded in vanilla JS (ECMAScript proposal). I feel like this would be the ideal scenario: things working right out of the box without needing a compile step or additional tooling.

You can get as close as it gets to this experience by using alternative runtimes such as Deno or Bun, which have native TS support (meaning you can just execute a .ts file without having to transpile it), but of course as soon as you have to write code for a browser you are back in the middle ages.

Typescript may have a million problems that make getting into it annoyingly hard and even seem pointless, but once it's settled in your project and used well... Damn is it fucking good.

And I'm saying that even though I had to disable intellisense and most of those advanced features because the project I work for is too large and typescript would easily use over 20GB of RAM and get my computer to freeze.

But if you're trying to use it like a traditional typed language, you'll only see the bad side of it and you'll certainly hate it.

typescript is a bandaid on a severed leg

My issue with typescript... and, correct me if I'm wrong... is it doesn't exist without Javascript. Typescript needs to be compiled down into Javascript to be run. It has no stand alone interpreter (that I'm aware of) and definitely not one baked into web browsers or NodeJS (or adjacent) tools. In essence, Typescript is jank sitting on top of and trying to fix Javascript's uber jank, simultaneously fracturing the webdev space while not offering itself as a true competitive and independent language for said space.

That's my amateur two cents for what it's worth.

I'm kind of a beginner... Can someone explain why you would make/use/have a dynamically and/or weak typed language? Is it just to not write some toInteger / as u64 / try_from()? I mean the drawbacks seem to outweigh the benefits...

I learned typescript because so many authors are using it.

I think it's like jQuery. Learn it because you'll have to debug someone's code one day.

I’m not on Twitter, what’s happening?

HTML + CSS. No need for any of that newfangled "*script" bloatware / malware.

I am just a little "programmer" (if I can even call myself like that), and I'm using Typescript. Sure, it has it's own shortcomings, as everything, but it looks better than plain JS (at least in vscode)

I like TypeScript for its types and type-checking, but I also want to write JavaScript to avoid having a local build step, and having to wait for things to transpile/compile/etc when running locally. I have a pretty large project where I've gotten both worlds by just using JSDoc and only using TS for type-checking. VSCode still offers built-in type-checking with JSDocs and ofc the type-checking can also be run separately if needed.

What's happening?

Just use Kotlin to write your JS/TS