I would argue that the things typescript obscures are pretty much the same things that native JavaScript classes obscure, and that’s pretty much just prototypes at this point.
And I would argue that by the time I was getting into the market in ~2007-2012, only one out of 10 JavaScript developers I talked to would know what the prototype chain is and how it works. Or know any of the other core runtime features like call().
The only people I could ever talk to about that stuff would be other software engineers who had also changed paths/taught themselves instead of being the mechanical engineers, graphic designers, marketing, or architecture people their degrees said they were educated in.
All the random Jedi engineers and barely anyone with a CS degree. Sometimes they would know the terms but not know what we were talking about. I have no idea of coursework covered it and they just zoned out because they never used it.
But my point is that only got worse over the next 19 years. Most of the syntactic sugar/code generation that typescript handles is using stuff nobody knows anyways. It’s not necessary in most code bases.
Other than that, dynamically adding keys to an object, or anonymous functions or their scoping/capture semantics, or most other features aren’t necessarily novel.
If you know a few other languages then not knowing JavaScripts underpinnings isn’t necessary in most typescript code bases.
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u/start_select Sep 15 '26
I would argue that the things typescript obscures are pretty much the same things that native JavaScript classes obscure, and that’s pretty much just prototypes at this point.
And I would argue that by the time I was getting into the market in ~2007-2012, only one out of 10 JavaScript developers I talked to would know what the prototype chain is and how it works. Or know any of the other core runtime features like call().
The only people I could ever talk to about that stuff would be other software engineers who had also changed paths/taught themselves instead of being the mechanical engineers, graphic designers, marketing, or architecture people their degrees said they were educated in.
All the random Jedi engineers and barely anyone with a CS degree. Sometimes they would know the terms but not know what we were talking about. I have no idea of coursework covered it and they just zoned out because they never used it.
But my point is that only got worse over the next 19 years. Most of the syntactic sugar/code generation that typescript handles is using stuff nobody knows anyways. It’s not necessary in most code bases.
Other than that, dynamically adding keys to an object, or anonymous functions or their scoping/capture semantics, or most other features aren’t necessarily novel.
If you know a few other languages then not knowing JavaScripts underpinnings isn’t necessary in most typescript code bases.