Specifically, do you worry that Microsoft is going to eventually do the Microsoft thing and horribly fuck it up for everyone? I’ve really grown to appreciate the language itself, but I’m wary of it getting too ingrained at work only to have the rug pulled out from under us when it’s become hard to back out.

Edit: not really “pulling the rug”, but, you know, doing the Microsoft classic.

  • Tyfon@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    I’d like to point out that TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript, so if anything goes wrong with it, you can just remove the type information and you’ll have regular JavaScript.

    • silas@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      I’d still have to do some refactoring in and around my classes though. There’s some syntax that is TypeScript-only, including things like extended classes.

    • jeffhykin@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      If I take my json and add a .yaml extension it works. If I take my c code and add a .cpp it works. If I take my js code and add a .ts … it doesn’t work

      TS branches off of the JS syntax (which is great! way better than a syntax rewrite), but TS is not a superset; it does not meet the practical or technical definition of a language superset.

        • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago
          var foo = {};
          foo.bar = 42;
          

          Perfectly valid, and extremely commonly used, coding pattern in JavaScript - it’s essentially the normal way to do an associative array or hashmap in JavaScript. It’s also one of the commonly used ways to (poorly) simulate OOP in JavaScript.

          In TypeScript, it fails. You can’t treat an object as an arbitrary key/value pair. That’s a good thing… but still, it means TypeScript is not a superset of JavaScript.

          AFAIK that source code will be accepted by the TypeScript compiler if the file has a *.js extension, but that’s an ugly workaround and it also means you can’t copy/paste code between files. You have to rewrite the code.

          • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            In TypeScript, it fails. You can’t treat an object as an arbitrary key/value pair. That’s a good thing… but still, it means TypeScript is not a superset of JavaScript.

            No, it doesn’t fail. It compiles to perfectly valid JS that runs exactly as you’d expect. The type checking itself errors, because you’ve made an error - but the compilation isn’t prevented by this error.

            So yes, Typescript is a superset of JavaScript.

            • jeffhykin@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              That is an important difference. Still lots of people, myself included, classify “compiler printing an error (not a warning)” as failure, even if bizzarly the code still runs somehow.

              • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                That’s because you’re missing the distinction between compiler and type checker. The compiler doesn’t check types, it strips them. The type checker only checks types, it doesn’t compile. They are often used in conjunction, though increasingly the compilation is done by e.g. esbuild.

                But there is nothing “bizarre” about the code running, since literally, TS is a superset of JS.

        • jeffhykin@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Type annotations. It can be as simple a adding any in front of parameters, but there are other edgecases too, and when you have a really big codebase it can be a pain to convert.

        • jeffhykin@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          I didn’t say C++ was a superset of C, I said “if I take my c code and add a cpp extension it works”. Believe me, I am painfully aware of the not-a-superset problem between C and C++. My point is Typescript doesn’t even meet the very loose “its practically a superset” relationship that C++ has with C.

          • mrkite@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            if I take my c code and add a cpp extension it works

            and I pointed out that it doesn’t if your C code has a variable called “class”.

            • jeffhykin@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              Don’t worry, none of my code uses that, designated initilizers, complex numbers, variable length arrays, typedef name overloading, unintilized constants, implicit void pointer casting, implicit function declarations, nested struct defintions, or any of the other exclusively-C features.