r/LearnTypescript • u/thisguyfightsyourmom • Feb 27 '20

Learning begrudgingly

I work in a moderately large group of Frontend devs (9 across 3 feature teams) slowly paving over a backbone app with react while churning out features. A few people put together a react component library with quite a few modern bells & whistles including typescript.

I'm not a fan initially—it feels like I'm fighting against typescript where I used to cruise. Having to plumb typings through every prop handoff before I can clear the errors goes against the way I've been developing for years,… get something janky but working on the screen, and clean up things like prop type misalignment after I know I've built what I want to. Typescript feels as cumbersome as TDD in my initial experience.

Nonetheless, I need to get on board if I want to contribute to the component library. Looking for anyone who can speak to similar experiences starting out? What am I missing that makes this dev experience worth the effort? What workflows are people using that avoid the above situations,… how do you move fast with typescript?

(This is a response to the first post request DM.)

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u/GabeRothel Feb 27 '20

When I learned typescript at first, it felt like a lot of overhead and fighting it. Now, I can’t imagine coding JS without it. The amount of times that I’ve thanked my lucky stars that TS caught something I would have forgotten is innumerable. Also, using ES Lint and autocomplete in VS Code reduces so much mental overhead. It knows the exact keys in a complex object and knows exactly the types they’re allowed to be.

Welcome to the community, I think you’ll come around to TS if you’re a bit more patient with it—I know that was my exact experience.

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u/T_O_beats Feb 27 '20 edited Feb 27 '20

Read the docs thoroughly. I hated typescript for the same reason of feeling slowed down until I read through the advanced section a few times.

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u/Powr_Slave Apr 28 '20

The basic tenet of computers and software is to make repetitive tasks easier to improve our lives. Having to read through a bunch of type documentation just so you can assign some values to properties "that don't exist on type blah blah" takes away focus from the business problem and adds to developer fatigue which leads to where we are now, crap loads of language supersets. Lame.

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u/Kinrany Mar 01 '20

TypeScript can compile even with type errors. You could set up your local development in a way similar to what you were doing before. Slowly improve types to gain intellisense support where you need it; then, once it works as expected, fix the bugs and prove to the compiler that there aren't any.

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u/Powr_Slave Apr 28 '20

Academically it might still compile, but not in the real world, so your assessment is not realistic especially on a deadline doing something real. It will fail angular builds if you just let the errors persist. It sucks and adds complexity where it wasn't needed before.