A few days ago, David Heinemeier Hansson
announced
that Turbo 8
is dropping TypeScript
. I'm okay with that because I don't even know what Turbo 8 is. However, over the past few years, some frontend programmers have tried to sell me the idea that "TypeScript is useless, just use tests". I think people with such opinions either don't care about code quality or simply don't know what TypeScript is. Here, I will explain why you should use TypeScript.
My sense is that this argument primarily holds for teams without thorough code reviews. For individuals or teams with good reviews, TypeScript adds little except for complex code or massive rewrites. I’m not saying it adds little in absolute terms, but that it adds little once you account for the overhead of using it.
A quick check everytime when you build / package the code is surely more effective than a human code review.
Also the difficulty of coding in a language where there isn’t any static type analysis still remains. How does it even work, do you have to do a manual text search everytime you change some existing function or class?