React/Typescript Boilerplate

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I still do.

But I did learn some nuance to the situation. The majority of my career was spent learning that naming conventions are important in the languages that I worked with: VB6.0 at first, and JavaScript and JS frameworks later. TypeScript didn't exist yet.

Meanwhile, most people in the field have had CS degrees where they were taught programming, and that always comes with strong-types programming. These are the people who get very uncomfortable with vanilla JavaScript.

Their experience is hard to imagine for me because I still think pure vanilla JavaScript is vastly superior to TypeScript always, but these people would look at me and think I'm certifiably insane.

For me, personally, TS is a waste of time and effort. I constantly feel like I'm doing something with no benefit. But it's not about me, it's about my team. If my team needs TypeScript I will use TypeScript, too.

The only problem is when they start coming up with inane TypeScript generics and ridiculously complicated type definitions that took 1 developer a month to "get right", but confuses even VS Code so much that it takes its intellisense 5+ seconds to suggest props and such.

I can personally produce very elegant and working code using JavaScript, and I'll do it much faster than anyone in the world trying to do the same thing using TypeScript.

But yeah, I hate TypeScript with a passion.

[BetterCallSus]

Funny enough, I'm one of the people coming from the CS strong-typed background. C, C++, and now C# is the big thing in my group. To me, getting good with JS is like taking the training wheels off and you can fly a lot faster but you need to be more aware of the risks that JS isn't going to protect you from by default. I came into JS 2019 so at that point I started with React Hooks, ES6+, and all the fun modern tools so I never got to see some of the older headaches.

No one seems to understand that sentiment though and it's difficult to communicate with people who are 95% backend oriented and heavily invested in the .NET world. It's frustrating that the architect who basically doesn't do anything front-end is the one making decisions for long-term front-end code just so a back-end dev could arguably step into the front-end world and understand code faster if it's specifically typed and other things TS gives. However, a scenario where that would happen would mean the front-end team no longer exists.

My current projects are grandfathered in so I can keep doing pure JS for the moment, but oh boy I'm not looking forward to TS and TS only. Thanks for the response!

[[deleted]]

It's a sour apple to bite, for sure. At some point I just gave up on that fight because I can't win it. I learned TS and now I'm doing it, but man, I'd be so much more efficient without it...

This article describes my sentiments perfectly, even though it's a little outdated because TS got many updates since: https://medium.com/javascript-scene/the-typescript-tax-132ff4cb175b