I was talking to my manager the other day, discussing the languages we are using at $dayjob. He kind of offhandedly said that he thinks TypeScript is a temporary fad and soon everything will go back to using JavaScript. He doesn’t like that it’s made by Microsoft either.
I’m not a frontend developer so I don’t really know, but my general impression is that everything is moving more and more towards TypeScript, not away from it. But maybe I’m wrong?
Does anyone who actually works with TypeScript have any impression about this?
If TypeScript still is a fad at this point, his definition of fad is far lengthier than mine is.
I’m fairly sure TypeScript will remain in popular use longer than whatever project you’re working on 😅
As long as JavaScript is being used, TypeScript will be used. It makes writing JavaScript tolerable.
Imo they’ll add typing to vanilla js, which will kill ts.
And the ts devs support this
And I’m sure Microsoft would be happy to not have to do it anymore. And I personally would much prefer an actual typing system rather than a glorified linter.
Tho I wonder if it will end up being like jQuery, in the sense that, by the time core jQuery features got added to vanilla js, jQuery had developed new features that validated its continued existence. Maybe TS will go further than what gets absorbed into JS and keep it alive.
Honestly, I’ve never used jQuery despite writing JS for over 10 years. Just because I hate the reliance on massive nebulous packages so many have. Especially when I looked into it years ago, so much of what I saw jQuery being used for was stuff that was extremely easy to implement yourself. How has it changed?
jQuery is a lot smaller and less nebulous than its competitors (looking at you,
Reactliterally every JavaScript framework).Jquery was what was popular when i learned js. I’m kinda glad it was, honestly: jQuery is a little unique in that it doesn’t have magic to it the way js frameworks do. Everything you can do in jQuery, you can do in vanilla JavaScript pretty easily. With, say, React, how is a newcomer supposed to understand how a series of React components become HTML?
So jQuery kept it “real” for me. Fewer abstractions between me and the HTML meant it was easier for me to connect the dots as a self taught developer.
As for how it’s changed, it’s more any how vanilla JavaScript has changed. A lot of the things that made jQuery so much easier and cleaner than vanilla are now baked in, like document.querySelector(), element.classList, createElement(), addEventListener()… It had Ajax methods that, before jQuery, were a tremendous pain in the ass.
jQuery was great, but, you basically had to use it with something like PHP, because it had no back end. So when angular came out (and a few others that aren’t around anymore and I’ve forgotten), it allowed you to replace both PHP and jQuery, and developers rejoiced.
Why did they rejoice? I’m not actually sure there was reason to, objectively speaking. As developers, we like new tech, especially if that new tech requires us to think about code differently, even if, in retrospect, it’s a hard argument to make to say that, if we had just stuck with PHP and jQuery we would be somehow worse off than we are with React.
Of course, in tech, when a new system changes how we think, sometimes (not as often as we’d like) it helps us reconsider problems and find much more elegant solutions. So, would we have all the innovations we have today if all these js frameworks has never existed? Obviously we can’t really answer that – but it’s a toke of copium for when we get nostalgic for the PHP/jQuery days.
(Also, for you newer people reading this, you should probably be aware that the PHP/jQuery mini-stack is still very quietly used. You’ll definitely see it, especially in php-baaed COTS.)
Thanks for informing me, but I still kinda wonder why someone would use it today?
And also JS.
Well “kill” is perhaps a strong word but it definitely won’t be JS anymore at that point. The changes required to bake in strong type support would be radical.
That would be a great solution, because while I love Typescript, I hate compiled web code. One of the coolest things about the internet is that as it’s supposed to work, you can download the source code for any website you go to. It’s open source by design. I hate closed source websites and I hate compiled website code that helps close the source it’s quite a contradiction because typescript is awesome and I recognise that compilation is the only way to get it to run on our web infrastructure. So it would be great if we could just type JavaScript and solve the contradiction that way.
Doesn’t typescript compile to js anyways? Is it obfuscated?
It transpiles to js and there is some level of stripping for optimization yes.
It’s not intentionally obfuscated or minified. Generally it just strips out types and comments, but depending on how it’s configured, it will rewrite certain things to work in ES5. At my work our build process uses a separate minification and bundling step, which also serves to a obfuscate our proprietary code.
the can’t add proper typing without adding a compiler. Whatever they add will be closer to puthon’s type hints. I’ve had to write primary in python lately and type hints help very very slightly, and tools like pyright catch so many false errors due to lack of hints in libraries that we’re forced to add ignore statements on too many lines. I genuinely don’t understand how there can be so many languages and all of them be painful to use
I genuinely don’t understand how there can be so many languages and all of them be painful to use
What about kotlin?
yes I heard it’s great. Scala was one language where I didn’t constantly feel like getting hit in the head with a hammer and I’ve heard Kotlin has a similar experience. I’m not interested in Android development so I haven’t tried it
Kotlin isn’t just for Android; IMO unless you’re trying to do purely functional programming, it’s preferable to Scala for JVM work.
I have very minimal pain in Go
I’ve heard good things about it, looking forward to learning it (hopefully soon)
I was able to pick it up extremely quickly. Just basically looking at existing projects. Tbh, I don’t even know how I learned it.
CoffeeScript was a fad, but TypeScript seems to gaining more and more popularity these days, with new runtimes like deno supporting them natively. TypeScript finally gave Microsoft relevancy again in webdev world, so I bet they’ll go a great length to make sure it stays that way. If Microsoft were still making their own browser engine, I bet they’ll make it natively supports TypeScript too.
CoffeeScript was a fad because it didn’t solve anyone’s problems. It was basically “look how cool code you can write”.
TypeScript is gaining popularity because static typing solves real problems. It’s also a superset of JavaScript instead of being a completely new language from scratch, which makes it easier for JavaScript devs to learn.
it felt to me like coffeescript solved problems that people had, then js got equivalent features. arguably that could happen to ts as well
Exactly, it was pretty useful until ~2015 imho. Then JS got better, and coffeescript did not follow these evolutions.
CoffeeScript wasn’t a fad, it just became obsolete because JS adopted the syntax sugar CoffeeScript was selling. In a way, it did its job.
Yup! All of the following features were in CoffeeScript first: Modules, classes, arrow functions, async functions, parameter defaults, …spread, destructuring, template strings.
So I’d say it was extremely successful in making JavaScript better.
So it was Kotlin before Kotlin
A fad? No, definitely not. TypeScript brings features (and structure) that will /should probably make their way into JS.
It’s sort of like asking, “does SASS replace CSS” or “is liquid the next HTML?” They’re just implementations of features FE developers want in the core spec of JS, CSS, and HTML.
that will /should probably make their way into JS.
Not really, IMHO. The main advantage of TS is that it will help you catch errors without having to run a particular piece of code - i.e. you won’t have to move to the third page of some multi-page form to discover a particular bug. In other words, it helps you catch bugs before your code even reaches your browser, so it doesn’t bring you much to have them in the browser.
(There is a proposal to allow running TS in the browser, which would be nice, but you’d still run a type checker separately to actually catch the bugs.)
I think the important part is that the syntax will become standardised, rather than being defined by microsoft/typescript, potentially allowing for alternative implementations. It could also make the build step optional in some cases, which is something people dislike about typescript currently.
Hoping this is true. The biggest annoyance with typescript is needing some kind of compiler. Haven’t used Bun or Deno very much, both of which natively support TS, but there are still incompatibilities with the way Node does things and how certain modules were built (CommonJS vs ESM). I like writing JavaScript but the tooling is utter crap.
TypeScript might not be here to stay, but typed JavaScript definitely is. I’ve switched to writing 100% TypeScript, and haven’t looked back. The fact that just adding types to one of my (admittedly more complex) libraries surfaced 3 unknown bugs was eye opening to me.
I believe both are true… and I also develop a LOT in Angular (with TypeScript).
TypeScript is great but the thing is that if you look at the history of TypeScript and JS/ECMAScript you’ll find out that TypeScript sometimes is the testing ground for the future features of ECMAScript - pretty much like what happens with Sass and CSS that how even has nesting and scopes.
The issue with TypeScript/Sass etc. is that it requires a compiler and that’s totally obnoxious and completely defeats the point of having interpreted code on browsers. Depending on the project it might be better to go for TypeScript + Angular/React or other compiled solution or simply something vanilla with jQuery or the Vue runtime (no compilation) and other libraries.
If TypeScript ever goes away the underlaying features that make it great will be implemented in ECMAScript in the same way that we got modules, classes etc. and I really hope it happens. Less compilation usually equals code more maintainable in the long run because you won’t require hundreds of dependencies (that will eventually break) to get it to compile.
TypeScript sometimes is the testing ground for the future features of ECMAScript
They have an explicit policy to only include features that are stage 3 already (i.e. that are pretty much certain to land in the language as-is). The only times they’ve diverged from this is long in the past (I think
enumis the main remnant of that, for which I’d recommend using unions of literal string types instead), andexperimentalDecoratorsunder pressure from Angular - which has always been behind a flag explicitly named experimental.So I really wouldn’t worry too much about that.
Oh I’m not worried, at all.
The issue with TypeScript/Sass etc. is that it requires a compiler and that’s totally obnoxious and completely defeats the point of having interpreted code on browsers.
Shouldn’t WebAssembly be a solution to this? I.e. so you don’t have to interpret code but rather run the wasm binary (which is kinda interpretation as well but you get what I mean).
I love seeing webassembly getting traction because it enable cool stuff never thought possible before running in web browsers. But webassembly is a blackbox that can’t be tinkered with by end users. I dread the day webassembly become so widely used that average websites run under webassembly because that would be the end of blocking ads or tweaking websites behavior with greasemonkey scripts.
I don’t think adblockers rely on interpreting JavaScript, I think they would still work even if a site used WebAssembly.
Source: I can assure you every single ad-funded website would be doing this if that was the case.
ublock origin won’t help you blocking the ad elements if the entire website ui is rendered in a canvas (already starting to happen thanks to some frameworks like flutter) and can’t block the ad logic if it bundled in the wasm along with the rest of the app. It might still able to block the requests, but they’re starting to serve the ads from the same domain that serves the website so it can’t be blocked without breaking the website itself, and might begin to serve those over websocket so adblockers can’t block it by url path. With javascript, an ad blocker might still be able to monkey patch the ad logic on runtime to break it, but with black box like wasm I’m not sure if such thing is possible.
Once tooling and frameworks make it easier for average webdevs to use webasm, I’m sure ad companies will begin to offer it in their ads sdk. Thankfully most websites with ads are still care about SEO so at the very least we can be sure it won’t happen anytime soon, unless something changes in how google works that could enable this.
the entire website ui is rendered in a canvas (already starting to happen thanks to some frameworks like flutter)
That sounds like an accessibility nightmare.
Have you tried not being disabled?
Flutter devs actually defended this approach, saying the web in general is moving to this direction. I think they’ve mellowed out somewhat and released html renderer support, though it’s still default to canvas for desktop web browsers.
That’s not a solution, it is the exact opposite - adding even more compilation and complexity to things. The ideia is to move away from compiled stuff as much as possible. WebAssembly makes sense for very complex and low level stuff that you can’t run interpreted with reasonable performance.
Less compilation usually equals code more maintainable in the long run. Think about it: if you don’t need a compiler and the hundreds of dependencies that will eventually break things will last way more time. Websites from the 90’s still work fine on modern browsers and you can update them easily while compiled stuff is game over once you lose the ability to install run said compiler and related dependencies.
Think about it: if you don’t need a compiler and the hundreds of dependencies that will eventually break things will last way more time.
You can have hundreds of dependencies whether you use a compiled or interpreted language, that really has nothing to do with that.
Also compilation has lots of benefits, including being able to do lots of static analysis to find bugs. I definitely don’t agree that we should move away from compilation in general or WebAssembly specifically. WebAssembly doesn’t have to be only used for low level stuff, you can write your code in a high level language and compile to WebAssembly just fine.
Javascript is a fad, we should all move to WASM. 🙃
But no, TypeScript is not a fad. Unless a better “Typescript like” thing comes out - I know how in frontend land people like to make their own substitute framework that does something slightly different than an existing framework - But I don’t really see why anyone would want to make a NewTypeScript, and not just expand existing TypeScript
Typescript makes writing Javascript a reasonable thing to do. Your manager is a fad.
Your manager is a fad.
If only…
5 years ago everything was moving to TypeScript. Now everything has moved. Developers are still catching up, but it will be one-way traffic from here.
I’m guessing your manager thinks TypeScript is like CoffeeScript. It is not like CoffeeScript.
Also, TypeScript is only the beginning. In the halls of the tech giants most devs view TypeScript as a sticking plaster until things can be moved to webassembly. It will be a long time until that makes any dent in JS, but it will also be one-way traffic when it does.
Static typing, for the win, and I’ll die on this hill.
I don’t think it’s going away until ECMA supports native types. Until then it’s the best game in town.
If a team decides to move away from it, it’s only few hours work to entirely remove. So even if it’s going away, it’s risk free until then.
But I cannot imagine why any team would elect to remove Typescript without moving to something else similar. Unless it’s just a personal preference by the developers who aren’t willing to learn it. It removes so many issues and bugs. It makes refactoring possible again. I think teams that want to remove all types are nostalgic, like a woodworker who wants to use hand tools instead of power tools. It’s perfectly fine, and for some jobs it’s better. But it’s not the most efficient use of a team to build a house.
Based solely on gut feel, I think Typescript will become less popular as Wasm grows
When will Wasm grow, according to your gut? I feel like I’ve been waiting for a decade now.
WASM made huge strides last year. You can run entire operating systems inside a WASM hypervisor now, and lots of packaging and transpiling projects came of age last year.
Great, but can you access the DOM?
By saying gut feeling I hope I am being clear I have zero tangible evidence? 😅
Maybe over the next decade its usage will grow? Or maybe it will end up relegated to performance critical applications, or JS/TS just end up with the same/better performance anyway.
The next step is to implement things like this:
https://github.com/WebAssembly/tool-conventions/blob/main/Coredump.md
After that, all we need is a rich ecosystem of libraries in other languages. It’s still a fair way off, but it’s coming.
I think you’ve got a point here, in that the sort of Devs who want to be able to refactor their code without breaking everything are also going to be the group who lean more into having code that actually runs quite fast; but given that reasonML is awesome and didn’t get much mindshare my position here is that wasm will only start to eat into tyspecript’s lunch well after a huge subset of TS can be compiled to wasm (or maybe python ((I blame the xkcd guy for python’s unreasonable popularity, I feel it’s hugely overrated))).
Javascript is a fad.
Reject web dev; return to native.
Imagine changing your file extension from .js to .ts and calling it a fad. JS is TS. The difference is that TS does more (by actually doing stuff before runtime as a static analyzer, similar to eslint). If TS is a fad, then modern web dev is a fad.
Which, to be fair, it is.
after reading the title I thought he’d suggest something better than TS would take its place, but going back to JS? nah
