TypeScript

We’ve been experimenting with TypeScript at General Assembly the past few days and been pleasantly surprised at how great it is.

It’s already raised issues in our code and it’s starting to instil more confidence in our work. Since working with Go recently, and C/C++ last year, I’ve really been enjoying static types and so was keen to give this a go. Fortunately, the packages we are currently using all have types defined and the React support is really good (hello .tsx)!

Not only has is it making our code less error prone, but the tooling, like autocompletion, is phenominal. Most people are using Visual Studio Code as it is tightly integrated into Microsoft’s editor, but the Sublime package has also been very good for myself.

If all goes well in the next few weeks of usage, I’ll be looking to force strict type checking on all of our future Javascript work with the help of TypeScript. With a multitude of frameworks adopting it (like Angular) and the recent usage statistics showing exponential growth, I truly think this might be the way we develop Js apps in the future.

A couple of resources worth checking out: