JavaScript reminds me of an older brother who happens to be the most laid back stoner you could meet. "Like yea man, you should probably use semicolons, but I ain't gonna narc"
After switching to typescript with linting and prettier I simply hate writing vanilla JavaScript anymore. Some people complain about the extra project setup needed but I find that time pays for itself immediately.
Extra project setup like pnpm add -D typescript && tsc --init? One thing that is kinda annoying is that you have to manage were will js files go.
Same reason you use typescript. It helps you catch bugs and follow programming best practices. You also don't need typescript, but with it your code is better. Typescript is technically just a really fancy linter. The actual compilation mainly just removes the type data and does some JavaScript engine compatibility.
You need to remember that a lot of those best practices are to cover for the performance issues from misusing loosely typed variables.
The JavaScript engine can compile clean, type-safe code down to be almost as fast as properly compiled code. When you use various features like the loose equals or various object mutations and the like, the engine cannot optimize it, leaving your code much, much slower.
Yup! I love TypeScript, and I love the flexibility of JavaScript. With all of the type templates and generics and other black magic TypeScript has, it's pretty easy to even support the crazy stuff like mixins and contextual parameters (if I'm not speaking too loosely while avoiding proper terms!).
A lot of the crazy stuff won't optimize, but at least it goes to show how it's not really tying JavaScript's hands even when requiring TS everywhere.
It adds even more auto formatting rules so you can basically stop thinking about formatting entirely. I used to be opinionated about formatting but now I just go with whatever prettier does. It's not always the best but it's consistent and it's a big chunk of my brain I can free up for things that matter. It also formats things safely so you don't run into those weird edge cases where semicolons matter if you choose to turn them off.
Aren't some of the scenarios for needing a semicolon logical-domain problems and not syntax issues? I wouldn't trust autoformatting to spot a logical problem, though I also hope no one is writing code that flippantly. (as if honest mistakes aren't common enough!)
Yes, true. I also did setup so that any missing semicolon will be added, because I got sick of not inserting them sometimes and then some code was without them and some was. (Before I tested just leaving them all out, out of fun, so I got into the habit of just leaving them out regularly)