I tend to see a glut of tooling as a sign that a language has serious design flaws, as most important things should be done by the compiler, but I’d rather have JavaScript with proper tooling and types than nothing at all.
JS is a great language for it's intended purposes but I still can't get onboard the TS train. Adding types post-hoc has never improved a codebase that I've seen but it has caused a lot more bad patterns to show up.
> JS is a great language for it's intended purposes
Which part of JS, as a programming language, do you see as great or even adequate when compared with contemporary programming languages?
> Adding types post-hoc has never improved a codebase that I've seen but it has caused a lot more bad patterns to show up.
That assertion makes no sense. I mean, all TypeScript does is impose arbitrary sanity checks on a programming language which is plagued for not having any. Where do you interpret the addition of sanity checks as a source of problems?
> Adding types post-hoc has never improved a codebase that I've seen but it has caused a lot more bad patterns to show up.
I mostly meant that I do all my greenfield JS dev using TypeScript. Out of curiosity, what bad patterns have you seen caused by adding types “post-hoc”?
Maybe it’s just because I was raised on this ecosystem, but in my opinion the sheer amount of incredible functionality you get from all this tooling (at the low price of $0!) is worth 10-15 set-and-forgot files that don’t even show up when you type ls.
While I totally agree that the functionality of most tools is really impressive, this doesn't mean that the current standard of dropping 5 new config files into root for a tool is the best way to handle this. There are ways to do better. It seems that the maintainers of those tools just don't care.
