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.

  • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
    43·
    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
      8·
      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
        1·
        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
          1·
          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.