A few days ago, David Heinemeier Hansson
announced
that Turbo 8
is dropping TypeScript
. I'm okay with that because I don't even know what Turbo 8 is. However, over the past few years, some frontend programmers have tried to sell me the idea that "TypeScript is useless, just use tests". I think people with such opinions either don't care about code quality or simply don't know what TypeScript is. Here, I will explain why you should use TypeScript.
This is a really surprising retort.
In the end, the only thing that has value is what ends up in the user’s hands. The rest is only a means to an end, in the very best case.
This is not a controversial take in professional software development.
What is self centered and self absorbed is putting misguided notions of “craftsmanship” and maintainability over business needs.
If you can’t see that writing readable code is part of the means to that end, I don’t know what to tell you. If nobody can maintain the codebase because it’s a mess of spaghetti logic and 20-deep dependency trees (I’m looking at you, every JavaScript project I’ve ever seen), the end product is going to suffer while also making every single engineer working on it want to leave.
Funny, it sure seems like “maintainability should not be a priority” is a pretty controversial take to me.
You are making a lot of assumptions. You don’t know what my product is, how it is developed, what it’s used for, what its lifecycle is. Whether improving maintainability or code quality would be a net benefit, and whether using type script would be a possible solution.
You also didn’t bother to find out.
You just charge at me guns blazing, trying to string me up for heresy.
How many things can you prioritize?
In my world we prioritize one. And that not the one.
Then I’m really glad I don’t live in that world.
Weird. In most cases priorities change as the situation demands. The application doesn’t matter when it comes to maintainability. Tech debt will take down any application if you keep ignoring maintainability at the expense of just delivering more and more. You sound more like a manager than a developer.
Even their excuses if a “24h only event app” don’t hold water
Even in that case, a business would be wanting to make many of those apps, and this commenter is arguing making a new one from scratch every time over massively simplifying things with quality reusable code.
Even their own example shows how terrible it is an idea to deprioritize code quality/readability.
I guess they are running some kind of shovelware company with constant bluffings.
Maybe, but you can push it really far before the breaking point is reached.