TypeScript : A Task Complexity Mismatch

Some might find this hard to believe given my current stance on it, but I was an early adopter of TypeScript. Long before it became hot and trendy., when people were still fighting its adoption, I was testing. But the more I used it, the more I soured on it. The coding hurdles it introduced; the deepening of the build stack; increased reliance on tools; the cryptic syntax used in many of its constructs; whilst in reality providing few if any legitimate benefits. At least not in relation to how I go about writing code.

Over the past year it seems many others are coming to the same conclusion I did. The “benefits” are outweighed by the drawbacks for a great many projects. Drizzle, Svelte, Ruby on Rails, and now Turbo have all jumped off the ship back into vanilla JavaScript’s loving arms. Or they use alternatives like “JS Doc Comments” as to avoid the extra compile step.

They have learned the lesson I recognized years ago, that TypeScript adds more complexity than any of its alleged benefits could offset.

I can still see places where it would in fact be useful, but the real problem is people started throwing it at everything, when to be frank for things like client-side scripting it’s just not a good fit.

Note, I’m going to mention various propaganda techniques across this article. I would suggest…