TypeScript is good. It does find errors in your JavaScript. But it is a form of "turd polishing". But Ciro Santilli would rather have a polished turd than a non-polished one.
Part of the reason TypeScript became popular is due to the universality of asset bundlers. Once you are already using an asset bundler, changing the
.js extension into .ts to get a less shitty experience is an easy choice.The other big reason is that JavaScript is so lose with type conversions, notably undefined happily converting to strings without problems, and any missing properties of Object happily being undefined. We should actually use ES6 Map everywhere instead of using Objects as maps.
Since TypeScript is not the default form of the language however, it inevitably happens that you need to add external types for a gazillion projects that are using raw JavaScript, and sometimes fight a lot to get things to work. And so we have: github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped. Not sure if this is beautiful, or frightening.
But in the end, as with other type of static linters, TypeScript generally transforms a few hard to debug runtime issues, into a bunch of stupid to solve compile time issues, which is generally a good thing.
The fact that this it parses comments JSDoc comments in JavaScript files is quite amazing.
Examples under typescript. Run each one of them with:Helper:
npx tsc example.ts
node example.jstsr() (
# ts Run
f="$1"
npx tsc "$f"
node "${f%.*}.js"
)
tsr example.ts- typescript/inferFromInit.ts. Should fail with:since TypeScript infers the type of
ifrom first assignment asstring, and we then attempt anumberassignment later on - typescript/inferAfterInit.ts. Does not fail, as the first assignment cannot be computationally determined at runtime without breaking computer science.
- typescript/js-from-ts/main.ts: call JavaScript file typescript/js-from-ts/notmain.js from TypeScript.TODO we are unable to make it typecheck that require, i.e. make that fail, but we've seen cases in complex codebases where that did happen and www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/intro-to-js-ts.html has infinite information on supporting it. So... how to make it fail??
npx tsc jsFromTs.ts && node jsFromTs.js - typescript/functionArgument.ts: basic argument tests
- typescript/functionOptionalArgument.ts:
f(n?: number)
- typescript/functionOptionalArgument.ts:
- typescript/functionOptions.ts:
f({n, s}: {n: number, s: string})
Some major annoyances of TypeScript:
- destructuring assignment in function arguments requires repeating all arguments:
- stackoverflow.com/questions/12710905/how-do-i-dynamically-assign-properties-to-an-object-in-typescript how to dynamically assign properties to objects without defining explicit interfaces? We really need a syntax of type:
const myobj = { i: 2, [s string], } if (something) { myobj.s = 'asdf' }
Since JavaScript devs are incapable of defining an unified import standard, this design pattern emerged where you just check every magic global one by one. Here's a demo where a Js library works on both the browser and from Node.js:
- web-cheat/umd_my_lib.js: the library
- web-cheat/umd.js: Node.js user
- web-cheat/umd.html: browser user
stackoverflow.com/questions/5617314/perl-regex-print-the-matched-value/5617355#5617355
perl -lne 'print for /mykey=(\d+)/'Examples under python.
Ciro Santilli's wife was studying a bit of basic Python for some job interviews, when she noticed:Damn right, girl, damn right.
Wow,inis so powerful! You can dofor x in list,for x in dictandif x in dictall with that single word!
Ciro remembers hearing about Python online briefly. It seemed like a distant thing from the Java/C dominated (and outdated) university courses. Then some teaching assistant mentioned during some course when Ciro was at École Polytechnique that Python was a great integration tool. That sounded cool.
Then finally, when the École Polytechnique mathematics department didn't let Ciro Santilli do his internship of choice due to grades and Ciro was at an useless last moment backup internship, he learned more Python instead of doing his internship job, and was hooked.
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. Web editor. You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact