Not defending that code - and I agree with you that wild TS code gets nightmarish (I usually call it a “type explosion”) but
Waaaay back when in my C++ days, starting to get into template metaprogramming, the “aha!” moment that made it all much easier was that the type definition could be thought of as a function, with types as input parameters and types as output parameters
Recentlyish, this same perspective really helped with some TS typing problems I ran into (around something like middleware wrapping Axios calls).
It’s definitely a “sharp knife” if you overuse it, you screw yourself, but when you use it carefully and in the right places it’s a super power.
It isn’t :/ I’d be down to recreate it if you can point me at an open-source project to do it in! :)
Basically - we had some custom framework-ish code to do things like general error handling, reference/relationship/ORM stuff, and turning things into a React hook.
I rewrote what we had to use function passing, so that you could define your API endpoint as the simple Axios call (making it much easier to pass in options, like caching config, on a per-endpoint basis).
So you’d define your resource nice and simple, then under the hood it’d wrap in the middleware, and you’d get back a function to make the request (or a React hooks doohickey, if you wanted).
But typescript doesn’t really play nice with function currying, so it took some doing to wrap my head around enough of the type system to allow the template type to itself be a template-typed function. That nut cracked when I remembered that experience with C++ typing; in the end it actually came out pretty clean, although I definitely got Clever(TM) in some of the guts.
Waaaay back when in my C++ days, starting to get into template metaprogramming, the “aha!” moment that made it all much easier was that the type definition could be thought of as a function, with types as input parameters and types as output parameters
Recentlyish, this same perspective really helped with some TS typing problems I ran into (around something like middleware wrapping Axios calls).
It’s definitely a “sharp knife” if you overuse it, you screw yourself, but when you use it carefully and in the right places it’s a super power.