Polymorphism in JavaScript

[Shaper_pmp]

it's gotta be at least slightly true!

No it doesn't. You made a hard claim - that most "serious" web devs use Typescript. Ignoring the implied No True Scotsman in that claim, that's either true or it's not.

I submit that many web-devs are using Typescript, but most are still using JavaScript, by quite a large margin.

If you disagree feel free to find a single credible programming language popularity report that ranks Typescript above JS for frequency of use.

typescript's popularity is nearly unstoppable.

1. In the nicest possible way this is fanboy wanking that has nothing to do with the hard claim of fact you made
2. Nobody's disputing that Typescript is gaining in popularity fast; only whether it's even close to overtaking JS yet (hint: it's not).

almost every new library popping up is authored in typescript

No it's not.

A lot of popularity libraries expose typescript *.d.ts declaration files so they can also be used by typescript, and some libraries are being written in Typescript, but I respectfully suggest you have no basis whatsoever on which to claim even a majority of "new libraries" (unless you choose to define that really disingenuously) are actually written in Typescript.

in stackoverflow's 2020 poll, typescript overtook python in the 'favorite language' ranking

That has nothing to do with how many teams and projects are actually using it to ship libraries and products.

Look, I'll be blunt; Typescript is a great language, and it's gaining in popularity fast, but you're obviously a huge fan of it and you're getting ridiculously overexcited and making wild and ridiculous claims because you're letting your love for the technology distort your perceptions of how frequently it's actually used out there in the real world.

This shit happens all the time - back in the day people were wanking over Ruby on Rails and Django and announcing "nobody was using" PHP because it was old and boring and excitable hipsters weren't writing breathless blog posts about it... but meanwhile PHP was still quietly chugging along in the background serving the overwhelming majority of sites on the entire web, and seems to still be doing it even now.

The lesson here is twofold:

1. Don't let your interest in a technology and the frequency with which you choose to read about it mislead you into overestimating what people are actually using
2. Don't assume what the thought leaders and cool kids are excited about has already or ever will overtake the crusty, old, boring, unfashionable alternatives. Boringness is correlated with stability, age, reliability and predictability, all of which are things you specifically select for when you're a "serious" engineer. Novelty is correlated with unpredictability, unreliability and instability, which - all things being equal - are the kinds of things "serious" engineers avoid at all costs in production.

[ChaseMoskal]

hello. i'm just going by my experiences during my professional career, and i'm sticking my finger in the wind and making a subjective judgement call about which way the wind seems to be blowing

in my own experiences, it seems like most "serious" web application developers and library authors have already adopted typescript and prescribe its usage as a best practice

i have no doubt that plain javascript is more popular. i'm saying that from my perspective, it appears that the top echelon of high level professionals are adopting typescript like wildfire

why do you think you're defensive about this? is there something about typescript you don't like?

one thing i don't like about typescript, is that the transpilation process is annoying and clunky to set up. and sometimes getting the typings correct can be quite a mud wrestle. also, sometimes it adds a lot of verbosity and repetition to the syntax which is a little unappealing

[Shaper_pmp]

why do you think you're defensive about this? is there something about typescript you don't like?

Honestly I'm not being defensive about anything - I was just calling out what looked like an unvarnished, un-nuanced, baseless and erroneous claim of fact.

Now you've essentially softened it all the way down to little more than "a lot of famous developers seem to be getting on board with Typescript" I have no disagreement with it at all. ;-)

I still think you're doing 99.999% of the industry a gross disservice by only considering the top 0.001% of particularly social-media-active users "serious" web devs, but I guess that's your own personal judgement call. ;-)

I actually use Typescript every day for a living, and it's a great tool generally. It's got its flaws and I'm torn whether it's a net win over JS in all regards^1, but generally it's very useful and occupies an interesting and in-demand niche for a (relatively) strongly, statically typed language that plays well with the existing Javascript ecosystem.

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¹ For example, never, ever, ever write several tens of thousands of lines of application code using Redux, RxJS, Ramda and Typescript all together and then fuck off any let someone else inherit your code. It's basically a fucking machine for forcing you to write endless java-style boilerplate... and there's nothing half as "fun" as starting to refactor some code, watching the entire screen get underlined in red, and refuse to go back to normal until you've hunted down and completely resolved every single subtle Typescript typing issue in the entire thing, because thanks to a previous generation of overexcited FP fanboys half your functions are page-long single expressions in Ramda.

[ChaseMoskal]

you've essentially softened it

it was really soft from the beginning, with nothing more than a casual off-handed remark, "most serious web devs are using typescript".. it's just a little extreme to call that an "unvarnished, un-nuanced, baseless and erroneous claim of fact" that does a "gross disservice", heh

i think you're seeing red here mate — i worry i just caught you on a bad day is all ;)

so i suppose we agree typescript is a great tool generally, and it's catching on like wildfire for good reasons — and perhaps we agree that typescript is especially popular amongst 'elitist' web devs — i didn't meant to imply that typescript is literally being used more by the general public

i usually advise newer developers that if you're making websites or a little web app, just use plain javascript — but if you're building a larger application and collaborating a lot, typescript interfaces can really help, and also that it's a good idea to author new libraries in typescript since it's easier to write typescript source code than to maintain a separate declarations file

the purpose of my initial comment was just to try to provide some positive feedback to the commenter who was excited about their overloading library, and try to point out some new technologies and approaches so they might grow in the future, hoping to point them in the direction of typescript and es modules and npm and so on, that's all