You can imagine that learning the codebase was pretty painful without TypeScript.Įvery time I wanted to be sure what a given argument is, I had to dig into the code and analyze it thoroughly. What’s more, the application had no unit tests whatsoever.

It had Express.js on the backend and React on the frontend. The legacy Node.js project – woes of JavaScriptįrom one of our customers, I inherited a legacy application written in Node.js. However, it’s still light years behind Node.js in terms of popularity and community support.Īnd that’s just too bad because I constantly come across Node.js projects that could use some TypeScript! Why? Let me tell you something about a project I recently completed that really succeeded… in annoying me. Ryan Dahl, one of Node’s original founders, is now promoting Deno – a TypeScript-first Node.js alternative. What’s more, various tools from the broadly understood Node.js environment now support TypeScript, including the increasingly popular NestJS framework. Node.js, being the most popular JavaScript runtime environment, eventually made it possible for TypeScript to be used for Node development (as well as some other compile-to-JS languages), but it continues to only support JavaScript fully. What about a TS Node dev?Ĭompared to the frontend, TypeScript was somewhat slower to dominate JavaScript on the web server side. These are mostly frontend developers, though.

Percent of developers who answered “yes” when asked about using TypeScript in the last year

Express js typescript