Is TypeScript a fad or is my manager delusional?

SorteKanin@feddit.dk to Programming@programming.dev – 140 points –

I was talking to my manager the other day, discussing the languages we are using at $dayjob. He kind of offhandedly said that he thinks TypeScript is a temporary fad and soon everything will go back to using JavaScript. He doesn't like that it's made by Microsoft either.

I'm not a frontend developer so I don't really know, but my general impression is that everything is moving more and more towards TypeScript, not away from it. But maybe I'm wrong?

Does anyone who actually works with TypeScript have any impression about this?

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Python also has a statically typed option these days.

Edit: Previously said "strongly" instead of "statically"

Which one? There is static typing with the typing module, but that's not strong.

I should have said statically typed, fixed.

Ah, gotcha, thanks! I'd have loved a strongly-typed option.

The static typing system is slowly getting there, but many useful Python patterns can't be expressed yet. You can, for example, write a function that appends an item to a generic tuple - but you can't concatenate two tuples. I really hope they keep expanding on the system!

Isn’t Python already strongly typed?

No:

$ python 
Python 3.10.13 (main, Jan 28 2024, 03:02:00) [GCC 13.2.1 20230918 (Red Hat 13.2.1-3)] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> def handle_foo(value: list[int]) -> bool:
...     return 42
... 
>>> print(handle_foo(False))
42

I haven’t used Python since around the time when type hints first became a thing so I might be completely wrong here, but isn’t this because Python just generally ignores type hints? If you ran a static type checker like mypy over this it would complain right?

Also, if you actually did anything with the list that you couldn’t do with a bool (e.g. len(value)), it would throw an error too because Python is actually pretty strict about types, just only at runtime. That’s why it’s usually considered to be strongly typed, although people don’t seem to agree what exactly that’s supposed to mean.