If you can play a song on an instrument, you probably like that song. You’ve gotten to know it. You’re part of each other now.

Tech can be like that. I have my own little bag of technologies that I know fairly well, so I like them. I like them a little more than technologies I don’t know yet.

My recent journies in TypeScript have me thinking of this. I’m adding it to my bag. We’ve done a bunch of work at CodePen in it now and are converting our JavaScript code over as we see fit. Plus, I’m chugging right along on my Execute Program training and have done a few mini side-projects in TypeScript. This combination of real-world practice and academic study has gotten me largely up-to-speed in TypeScript land.

Soon, I’ll be at risk of liking TypeScript. I’ll be one of those who tell you, “once you go TypeScript, you’ll never go back”. Just kidding — please inform me if I become that obnoxious. I want to be measured about all this. No technology is above criticism (oh god, please tell me you know that).

I see the value in TypeScript. It provides type safety in JavaScript and DX in VS Code. Since JavaScript likely requires tooling anyway these days, it’s starting to be no more laborious to set up than whatever you’re doing for JavaScript already. Then once you are comfortable with the syntax and how to win battles with it, you bask in that value.

It remains fair to ask the question: is it really worth it? Is the time investment in learning worth it? Are the battles worth it? Are you preventing contributions? If there are complications to your pipelines, are they worth it? Is it costing you and your developers time or saving it?

I have lingering doubts about how many bugs are actually about types. Of all the JavaScript bugs I’ve fixed in my years, it honestly doesn’t feel like that many were about wrongly typed data being flung around. Some days it feels like a wild hoax that an entire meta-language was invented around solving these not particularly common bugs. Like if fifty things went wrong with your house last year, one of them was a woodpecker pecked a hole in your siding, so you spend three years building a woodpecker-proof wall around your house.

There are more valid criticisms as well. A recent thread on Hacker News started by listing four things that intersect with what I’ve mentioned, and the comments have plenty of people both defending and further criticizing it. The error messaging, in particular, is the source of many battles. How much time fighting those battles is worth it?

If I had to pick a side (I don’t), I’m narrowly on the side of TypeScript, particularly when the code is being written for others or there are more than a few developers touching the code. I’m a sucker for DX what can I say. But I’d like to avoid the trap of liking it, or choosing it, just because I know it. If I can.

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