I inherited some frontend code at the end of last year and as a backend engineer, I had some catching up to do to take ownership of that.
I made good progress learning my way around the code base. I started with small additions. Then I updated the build system and dependencies. After a few weeks of messing with this and getting quite frustrated by the amount of stuff that broke everytime I touched something, I added typescript support. At that point I was pretty sure lack of types were slowing me down.
Adding typescript made life vastly easier. Before I did that, refactoring was a pain and I had essentially no idea if my changes would actually work. After that, at least the parts I migrated to typescript (properly, with strict mode), became a lot easier to deal with and I started editing with a reasonable level of confidence.
After having migrated a few thousand lines of js to ts, the lines of code you gain in terms of verbosity is very limited. Mostly you end up with the same number of lines of code or at best a few percent new lines.
Mostly the annotations happen in lines that you would in any case have: method and class declarations. This adds a lot of value as it also documents what is expected. The extra lines you gain would be things like interfaces to add strong typing to e.g. objects you deserialize from an API. I'd argue doing this adds a lot of clarity and VS Code makes doing this stupidly easy. Just go CMD+. and add the declaration automatically.
But then, typescript is in my opinion nothing more than a gateway drug for something better. If you like it, there are much nicer languages. Some of them even transpile to javascript or to WASM (or both in some cases).
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I inherited some frontend code at the end of last year and as a backend engineer, I had some catching up to do to take ownership of that.
I made good progress learning my way around the code base. I started with small additions. Then I updated the build system and dependencies. After a few weeks of messing with this and getting quite frustrated by the amount of stuff that broke everytime I touched something, I added typescript support. At that point I was pretty sure lack of types were slowing me down.
Adding typescript made life vastly easier. Before I did that, refactoring was a pain and I had essentially no idea if my changes would actually work. After that, at least the parts I migrated to typescript (properly, with strict mode), became a lot easier to deal with and I started editing with a reasonable level of confidence.
After having migrated a few thousand lines of js to ts, the lines of code you gain in terms of verbosity is very limited. Mostly you end up with the same number of lines of code or at best a few percent new lines.
Mostly the annotations happen in lines that you would in any case have: method and class declarations. This adds a lot of value as it also documents what is expected. The extra lines you gain would be things like interfaces to add strong typing to e.g. objects you deserialize from an API. I'd argue doing this adds a lot of clarity and VS Code makes doing this stupidly easy. Just go CMD+. and add the declaration automatically.
But then, typescript is in my opinion nothing more than a gateway drug for something better. If you like it, there are much nicer languages. Some of them even transpile to javascript or to WASM (or both in some cases).