Good, future proof code can be written in any language. There's lots of still functioning, well maintained js written 10yrs back out there.
We have legacy JavaScript dependencies and most of them worry me. I don't stay up at night worrying about the domain and range of TypeScript ones even if their testing is weak. There's a reason for that.cs TypeScript is loose where it should be loose and yet strongly encourages flexible but very clear typing that provides significant resistance to broken contracts and misunderstood semantics. I won't hire a web or Node developer who has a problem with it today because understanding the value of gradual and structural typing is, I strongly think, evidence of baseline competence.
"I write worse code, slower" is defensiveness masked as "a taste thing." We've improved the state of the art and it's better here.
I have worked with TypeScript, and I enjoyed it. It reminded me of ActionScript 3, a language I really enjoyed that's more or less dead now. And I also enjoy plain JS, and its just more powerful and expressive.
> I won't hire a web or Node developer who has a problem with it today because understanding the value of gradual and structural typing is, I strongly think, evidence of baseline competence.
If you think the benefits of "gradual and structural typing" cannot be achieved in JavaScript, you clearly don't understand the language. And that's ok. It is also ok hire people you are comfortable with, rather than those who challenge and disrupt your way. And I wouldnt want to work somewhere where the devs are too rigid or tribal about tools. Am more interested in what I'm building, rather than the tools used.
I knew JavaScript cold well before I was using TypeScript and I've shipped both mobile and web applications using JavaScript, as well as writing a solid amount of high-performance backend systems. And I ended up writing an eye-gouging number of tests that go away with TypeScript. It is literally, not figuratively, a way to dismiss entire classes of bugs. I may not understand JavaScript, but I'm not the one making factually inaccurate assertions about stuff up in here and that makes me really wonder how solid your conclusions can possibly be.
But as a gentle observation: people don't usually go on about "tribal" developers when the facts are on their side.
The typing there might add a few extra characters to your function definitions but you gain them back in terms of less need for documenting the argument types in comments. You hardly ever see typing inside of functions in Typescript so it hardly adds any verbosity.
In many cases typescript can also reduce verbosity because of more modern features and transpiling. For example early versions had foreach long before it was in ES and before Babel was as widespread as today. In fact you don't even need to add type annotations at all to run typescript, you can let it try its best on plain javascript, in those places where it's not obvious from context, just add the extra :string.
