Learning from React - part 5

  Learning from React series:

• Part 1 - why examining React is useful even if you won't end up using it
• Part 2 - what Facebook wanted to do with React and how to get a grasp on it
• Part 3 - what is Reactive Programming all about?
• Part 4 - is React functional programming?
• Part 5 (this one) - Typescript, for better and for worse
• Part 6 - Single Page Applications are not where they wanted to be

  Typescript is a programming language developed by Microsoft. It is a superset of Javascript that allows a lot of type checking and manipulation, hence the name. React and Vue fully support it while Angular requires it. So what is the reason for the adoption of this new language? What are its advantages and disadvantages?

  First of all, what is it? I would start metaphorically, if you can forgive that. Imagine a vast jungle, grown organically since time immemorial, chaotic and wild. Many developers went in, but few have come out unscathed, some never to be seen again. That's Javascript for you. It was released in 1995 as a basic scripting language for browsers, but it was designed as so flexible and complete that it could be used as a programming language in any context with minor modifications. For a very long time tightly coupled with its (very inefficient) browser implementations, it was dismissed from being a proper programming language. But that ended pretty much when V8 was launched, a performant Javascript engine that could be used separately to run the language in whatever situation the developer wanted. With V8, Chrome was launched and soon enough Node.js, which ran Javascript on the server as a proper language.

  The worst and best feature of Javascript is flexibility. You can do pretty much whatever you want in it, as it is a dynamic language unencumbered by such silly things as encapsulation, classes, types and so on. So if you started in a structured way, you could do a lot, if not - like most people unfamiliar with the language - you created a mess that no one could understand, including yourself. So if Javascript is a jungle, Typescript is Duke Nukem coming to cut the trees, wall off vast swathes of forest and only allow a narrow path for life to exist. Only, on that narrow path you get the same chaotic and wild proliferation. A lot fewer software developers traverse the forest and come out with PTSD, but a lot more people go through than before and mistakes can and will be made.

  I guess what I am trying to say is that Typescript sometimes feels like a square peg forced into a round hole. It is not a bad language. In fact, it is amazing in some parts. The type system introduced by Microsoft acts like a kind of system of annotations that inform on what you are actually doing. Tools are aware now of the types of values you use, can optimize code, find errors, warn devs, autocomplete code, help with development, etc. And I am willing to bet that people working on the language are having the time of their lives, because it has to be fun to work on abstract computer science and getting paid, too.

  But what does that mean for the frontend industry? It means that people are getting pushed on that narrow jungle path, for better or for worse. As a small business, you will have to either accept a shitty website created by cheap Javascript and vanilla HTML cavemen or get a lot out of your pocket to hire people who spend time and effort to understand Typescript and some, if not most, of the frontend frameworks that are fashionable at the moment. As a large company you will get tectonic shifts in technology, leaving a large part of your workforce in limbo, while having to spend a lot on hiring and redesigning flows. As an industry, we become dependent on several companies that spend the effort of keeping their frameworks up to date and documented. 

  Let me give you some Typescript questions (that I will not answer) to test your knowledge:

• can you tell me what all of these types are and how they differ from each other: undefined, null, any, unknown, never, void ?
• how can you tell if a Typescript object is of a specific form (the equivalent of the .NET 'is' or 'as' functionality)?
• what is the difference between a union of literal types and an enum?
• what are and how can you use BigInt, ReadOnlyArray, Partial, NonNullable, Required?
• what is the difference between a private member of a Typescript class and one starting with #?
• do you know how to use unions in interpolated strings?
• what is the difference between interface, type, class, type intersection, class expression and module?

 I could go on and on. On how the possibility of null is now something you have to declare explicitly, for example. I didn't (dare to) ask about type guards and how narrowing works and what conditional types are. And there are so many gotchas for developers coming from other languages, because the language features have been added by people who worked on C#, so they are kind of the same, but actually not. Type meaning and conversion is a large bit of confusing difference between Typescript and C#/Java. For example you can define a class and then cast some data to it, but you don't get what you expect:

class MyClass {
  public name: string='';
  public sayHello() { console.log(`Hello ${this.name}`); }
}

const my:MyClass = { name: 'Siderite' } as MyClass;
console.log(my); // { "name": "Siderite" }
console.log(typeof(my)); // "object"
console.log(my instanceof MyClass) // false
console.log(my.sayHello()); // ERR: my.sayHello is not a function 

There are still web sites dedicated to the inconsistencies of Javascript. Typescript doesn't solve these issues, it mostly hides them. I am sure it's fun to play with types, but is that the optimal solution for the problem at hand, mainly the many ways you can do Javascript wrong? I would argue no. It's fun to work in, but there is a clear dependency between Typescript and Javascript, which forced so many changes in Typescript from Javascript and the other way around, as they have to be kept in sync. All while Javascript needs to remain backwards compatible, too.

"But what about React? Weren't you talking about that, Siderite?"

Yes, I was. I only looked deeper into Typescript because I did this project in React. Before, I had used it with Angular and frankly I didn't feel the friction that I felt now. Angular is designed with Typescript in mind, the development experience is smoother. Angular also uses two directional bindings to propagate changes and that means less Typescript code. The only code you actually need to write is network API code, for which you have out of the box HTTP services, and some limited interface logic. React doesn't do that.

First of all, React has been designed within a kind of declarative/functional mindset, as I explained in previous chapters of this series. It focuses a lot on immutability and functions that are passed around and declaring what your expectations are. Typescript is fundamentally an imperative language. After forcing it through the round hole, the square peg now has to go through a triangular hole, too. The immutability forces one to use a lot of code for changes coming from the UI towards the Typescript logic.

Then, React is a library. It was designed as such and has less levers to force the developer in a direction or another. Even when following a clear development strategy, there are many of which to choose from, all tried and tested and valid, but very different from one another. The jungle was tamed, but now you must consider a multiverse of jungles, each with a different shape.

Finally, React started out in Javascript. Many documentation pages are still just about Javascript. New innovations in the field of React are developed and tested out independently, by various people with various skills and motivations. The learning curve is not steep, but the paths are many.

So in the end, Typescript is an interesting experiment in programming languages, one that will probably surprise me in the near future with ideas that can only be implemented using it. However it is not perfect and its dependency on Javascript is unfortunate, even if its inspiration was not. The purpose of the language was to guide and help developers mired in Javascript confusion, but using it with React goes against that very purpose, as React is still something relatively new and evolving wildly in all directions, so React doesn't help Typescript. Does Typescript help React? I would say yes. However I don't feel that it is enough in its current form. The friction between the two concepts is palpable and I dare any of you to prove me wrong.

It seems I've talked a lot about the problems of React rather than its benefits. I blamed it on things ranging from confusing and obsolete documentation to inconsistent goals of the library and underlying programming language. That's the way I work, focusing on problems so I can find one I can fix. In the next chapter I want to discuss about React in the wild and what are the good things people are saying about it. The most interesting question however, the one that I want to answer with this entire series, is how can we improve our work by adapting lessons learned, either from React to whatever we do or the other way around. What concrete ideas should we adopt from React and which we should condemn to the pit of failed concepts?