About TypeScript Hype

Andrea Giammarchi
3 min readOct 11, 2021

Are you happy about TS? Good, really good! We’re all happy about you being happy too … now, can you let it go too? Thank you!

Enough is enough!

I understand these days most job offers put all possible buzzwords in the required skills, and TS happens to always be there, but I am deadly tired of Twitter’s developers be like “TS or GTFO” for everything … seriously!

There are people not understanding the following points, pretending to be “moar professional” than others, or something … I don’t know … but, please let’s stop this madness already, shall we?

  • TypeScript doesn’t exist without JavaScript. It’s not like you write TS so JS is worse, doesn’t actually run your TS, or anything … please stop, thanks!
  • if you know TS more than JS it’s like saying you know Markdown more than HTML … does it make any sense to you, as Web developer? Please stop, thanks!
  • nobody skilled in defining types, without basic programming knowledge, will ever succeed in anything, programming wise … and scripting languages, like the one TS runs on, are the reason people have fun programming, so … please stop, thanks!
  • don’t ever try Python, right? Or maybe … please stop? Thanks!
  • if you’ve started coding 2 years ago or less, and already have a strong opinion about TS vs JS, it likely means you don’t know JS so much … so please stop, and keep learning? Thanks!
  • is any JS developer advocating against TS? ’cause I can see the other way around daily: please stop?!
  • nobody cares about you being that happy about how much TS solved your maximum 20 JS files projects so … unless you’re working on a very big, cross team, repository, one that might benefit, if ever, from some typed guided refactoring … please stop??!
  • there’s literally nothing TS can do that JS cannot, while there are dozen cases JS can do stuff TS cannot, or TS can’t type. Moreover, even deno moved its core to JS, and so did other projects TS based you’re so happy about ... so please, can you at least understand where TS is not ideal, or inferior, in a JS strictly optimized/dedicated world? Thank you!
  • JSDoc via TS are a perfectly valid use case for TS but most “TS developers” keep ignoring such fact… try it out and, maybe, enjoy JS again?!

As summary

  • you’re not better than people that know JS in depth and write JS only
  • you’re not faster at testing/running/covering your code (you need tools)
  • you’re not in control of what runs in production, ‘cause only resulting JS is
  • you’re not smarter, more professional, more experienced, than anyone writing JS before, or after, you decided TS is the only topic worth your time .. “TS or nothing”, “TS or it shouldn’t exist”, “TS or you’re not a real developer” … can’t you see you’re just obsessed with a pseudo “programming languages war” nobody should never ever care about?

Please stop this madness: if you like TS for reasons you experienced, we’re all good with that, or happy to learn about that, but if you keep shaming every developer or project that didn’t find what you found in this “yet another transpiled-to-JS language”, please don’t push your opinion further because … you know, it’s literally just your opinion.

So thank you for making Web development a better place, again!

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Andrea Giammarchi

Web, Mobile, IoT, and all JS things since 00's. Formerly JS engineer at @nokia, @facebook, @twitter.