I don’t know anything about what you are working on, if you say it works for your specific use case, fine. A better question for you would be, do you believe you could not write that UI if Typescript didn’t exist? You’d be able to, but I know you’ll argue ‘but it would be much more painful’.
Maybe, maybe not. But to entertain you, if the breadth of Typescript solves your niche needs, do you believe most UIs require that same exhaustive usage? Because that’s what’s happening, I’ve seen very simple things overusing it.
I don’t have much more to say about this, but happy to hear your last word.
> I don’t know anything about what you are working on, if you say it works for your specific use case, fine. A better question for you would be, do you believe you could not write that UI if Typescript didn’t exist? You’d be able to, but I know you’ll argue ‘but it would be much more painful’.
I worked on a team that happened to be starting on a cross-platform React Native app that needed to have its business logic able to be re-used on a couple other platforms that weren't well-supported by React Native (or React), but did support JS well enough, when we decided to trial TypeScript. The team had done a bunch of "apps" in React and a couple in React Native without TypeScript, before this.
TypeScript made things so much nicer. It cut necessary communication overhead during development down to almost nothing. Turnaround on platforms that were slow to deploy to was a non-issue because things almost always worked on the first try. Navigating the codebase was downright pleasant. Refactoring a library that was used by multiple platforms, a breeze. Simply excellent.
I am working on various UIs for data manipulation & visualization.
> Do you believe you could not write that UI
No, I wrote these UIs in bare JS and React before, using class-based components and old react state or mobx. I also maintain a library of components because I generally write multiple UIs simultaneously, which of course can use the same building blocks. Since React Hooks & TypeScript, my component library lost about 40% of the LOC (after adding type definitions), looks much prettier, and is infinitely more discoverable with type annotations and autocomplete on everything.
So, do I need it? No, you arguably never need type systems. But the developer experience is an order of magnitude smoother. I option-click into any component when I need to understand its type interface, and I don't need to read any code to do that! I also can seamlessly use graphql-codegen.
But maybe more to the point:
> I’ve seen very simple things overusing it
This is true of every construct, ever, do you not think? People are not inherently good programmers.
Ultimately, I admit that TypeScript and JS have design flaws and non-minimalist features that you can attribute to "dumb evolution" (i.e. people adding features here and there to JS, TS trying to ensure all sorts of JS are covered, TS trying to make sure you can handle all existing types of JS with TS, etc.). However, given the context being that JS & React/JSX are the dominant UI language for web, TS solves this use-case cleanly and with a great level of expressiveness. It is huge and can be overwhelming, but it's important to remember you don't need to use any of these things, and there isn't really. any sort of interop-gulf around TS either (i.e. someone exports a type, you can interact with it, no questions asked).
So, is it graceful from an idealist perspective? No, I concede this. However, it is a tool I would never again turn away from, and while I wouldn't necessarily say it enables me as an individual to do new things, I think it makes it possible to program ideas of high complexity and allow others to work with it much more easily than just JS, which enables me as a team member to boost my teammates.
Maybe, maybe not. But to entertain you, if the breadth of Typescript solves your niche needs, do you believe most UIs require that same exhaustive usage? Because that’s what’s happening, I’ve seen very simple things overusing it.
I don’t have much more to say about this, but happy to hear your last word.