Nick TaylorShout out to @rhymes for giving this post a review. ๐
Before the dev.to codebase was opensourced, I was working on it in the private repository and created an issue in there that has since been copied to the public repository (thanks @maestromac!).
Consider using Flow or TypeScript in the Front-End Codebase
#383
@nickytonline commented on Sun Apr 29 2018
I'm not saying we need to do this, but yes I am a convert of static typing in JavaScript, so I do have some bias on this.
Having worked on several projects with large JS codebases, I can definitely say that it eliminates a lot of silly mistakes, improves dx and it gives developers a clearer view of what contracts and shapes of things are in the codebase. I've even written about it in the context of TypeScript.
The reason why I'm proposing this is twofold. The first is everything above, the second reason is it may (no guarantees) pique developers interest in contributing to dev.to OSS on the front-end more than say on a project that does not use TypeScript or Flow.
I've used Preact with TypeScript and the support seems solid since their last release, but for Flow, I'm not sure as I haven't really used Flow. I threw out this question to the Twitterverse, https://twitter.com/nickytonline/status/990768742178152448.
A third proposal, if this was a no go for everyone, is you can still get some type checking from TypeScript if you're using VS Code without event having a whole TypeScript build pipeline set up. If you add a // @ts-check comment at the top of the file, you get type checking. See https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/javascript#_type-checking.
I was wondering what peoples' thoughts are on this?
@benhalpern commented on Tue May 01 2018
I"m in favor of this. And I think we're getting towards the end of a sprint where I and we collectively haven't been in the mindset to go back to the drawing board, but we're getting there now. This is definitely a convo I'd like to be having.
@nickytonline commented on Mon Jul 09 2018
@ben, this is probably something good to discuss before open sourcing the code base.
Looking at Flow and TS, I would probably lean more towards TypeScript. Not just because it's what I've been using professionally for quite some time, but because I think the ecosystem of types is larger and it has more adoption/tooling.
For reference, my blog post, Consider Using TypeScript mentions some fairly large/popular projects using TS, e.g. Slack, MobX, LinkedIn, RxJS etc.
Even though the new Preact components are currently just JS, you can go into a hybrid mode and slowly convert things to TS while still having JS live in TS land as valid JS is valid TS. This is what we do at the moment with a large project that we're converting slowly to TS.
This could also be a good way to have some live sessions about contributing to the code base. Maybe a few sessions about TS.
@nickytonline commented on Thu Aug 16 2018
@maestromac, when you have a chance, can you migrate this issue to the public repo? No rush as I'm off for another week. Thanks.
For those new to types, here's a post from Preethi Kasireddy about types.
Also, here's a fairly recent episode from the Script and Style podcast about types in JavaScript, Static Typing for JavaScript.
TypeScript
I'm partial to TypeScript myself. I've written about it here before.
There appears to be a shift towards TypeScript for those that are interested in types. I wrote a bit about it here
There is also a great episode on the React Podcast that talks about TypeScript with Jared Palmer.
Take TypeScript for a spin in one of the playgrounds:
- Unofficial Playground
Flow
Flow is another option in the frontend in regards to types, although I've never used it myself.
Here are some links if you want to read up on Flow.
- Writing Better JavaScript with Flow
- An Introduction to Flow
- Flow: A Static Type Checker for JavaScript
- I honestly did not really find many posts on dev.to about Flow, but feel free to check out the flowtype tag.
Take Flow for a spin in the Flow REPL
Other Options
I've narrowed it down to TypeScript and Flow as they are the most popular, but feel free to bring others to the table to discuss, e.g. Elm, Reason. (Thanks for chiming in on Twitter @magellol!)
Vanilla JS๐ฆ
If you really don't want to see the codebase converted to use types, that's OK too.
Are static types something that would interest people in the dev.to community who are contributing to or are thinking about contributing to the frontend codebase? Feel free to discuss in the comments here and/or jump on over to the GitHub issue and comment there.
