Tagged typescript (Blog)

• Apr 11, 2022, 8:13 PM -04:00

  The Philosophy of TypeScript Enums

  #TypeScript enums are kind of weird

  I'm a pretty big fan of TypeScript, probably best described as a statically typed language that transpiles to standard JavaScript. I've written about it before.

  People who have worked with me in the past may be surprised at my admiration, given the rancour I occasionally direct at something like the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-to-JavaScript transpiler, which to the casual eye seems to be in a similar vein.

  The similarities, however, are superficial; TypeScript and GWT are quite different beasts. Something like GWT is used in web development in order to avoid writing JavaScript. TypeScript, on the other hand, is best viewed as JavaScript extended with an optional static typing system. The optional part is key; in theory, any JavaScript program is also a valid TypeScript program. In other words, TypeScript doesn't try to hide the fact that it's merely an enhanced version of JavaScript.

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• Sep 2, 2018, 4:03 PM -04:00

  Angst and the Angular Module System

  Google's AngularJS is one of the most popular web frameworks out there, but it comes with its share of criticism (performance around two way binding being one of the more prominent complaints). Google responded by releasing Angular 2 (and, as of now, 4, 5 and 6), which addressed some of the issues but at the cost of being drastically incompatible with its predecessor, with no realistic way to upgrade except through pure elbow grease. Angular 2+ might as well be a completely different framework.

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• Jan 18, 2018, 8:46 PM -05:00

  Static Typing, IDEs, Automated Testing: An Eternal Golden Braid

  I've been a programmer by trade ever since I graduated from University. This is a fairly long time, as these things are measured. I still consider myself on a learning curve, but that's a separate conversation.

  My career, such as it is, mostly sidestepped the whole static versus dynamic typing debate that roiled in the early 2000's. School, when it veered into software territory, mostly consisted of C and Java, two statically typed languages. My professional life, until fairly recently, has been mostly in Java (with a bit of C++ thrown in for good measure) and hence has almost exclusively revolved around statically typed languages.

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