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3 Excuses Developers Give To Avoid TypeScript — and the Better Reasons They Should Use It

Before knowing the benefits of TypeScript, let’s understand why some people dislike it

Bill Wohlers
Better Programming
Published in
11 min readMay 24, 2021

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man sitting as if thinking, with an open book in his hand
Photo by Attentie Attentie on Unsplash

I recently wrote an article about the strengths of JavaScript and Node.js. In it, I made an apparently controversial claim: Developers should prefer TypeScript to JavaScript thanks to greater scalability and an improved developer experience.

Within hours, inflamed responses attacking TypeScript (and my article) started flooding my inbox. Many of these responses dismissed the benefits of a type system as minor, leading me to suspect that they haven’t worked on a sizable project with a decent TypeScript implementation.

Needless to say, if you haven’t used TypeScript or have only seen a poor implementation, I ask that you write a large app entirely in TypeScript before criticizing it. When you try it, you may — as many TS developers do — find that its benefits far outweigh any costs.

I’ll discuss some of these benefits in greater detail shortly. But first, I want to address some of the reasons for avoiding TypeScript that were mentioned repeatedly.

“It makes JavaScript more like Java and .NET”

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Bill Wohlers
Bill Wohlers

Written by Bill Wohlers

Software engineer at Candid Health

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