Most recently, TypeScript has become an incredibly important tool for building web applications. It is especially important for building scale web applications, because TypeScript ‘tames’ wild nature of JavaScript. What I mean by this, is that by default, JavaScript can be quite unpredictable. Things like type coercion and other odd JavaScript behavior can be confusing. TypeScript solves all those problems and helps you maintain large codebase.
What is TypeScript?
It is an extension of JavaScript with extra features. Essentially, it is an improved version of JavaScript.
It has a slightly different syntax for writing JavaScript, but ultimately it is ‘translated’ to JavaScript once the code is executed.
It is commonly used for creating web applications because projects like Netflix and Disney plus are getting increasingly complex. There are many projects that contain thousands of lines of code. Maintaining all that would be impossible using default TypeScript.
TypeScript was first released in 2013 by Microsoft.
TypeScript vs JavaScript – which one is better?
First of all, it’s important to understand that TypeScript is not a different programming language. It’s the same as JavaScript. The biggest advantage of TypeScript is that it fixes the biggest and most confusing part of JavaScript – type coercion.
JavaScript has a confusing way of converting one data types into others. For example, adding a string to an integer will convert both values to strings. Let’s look at this example
5 (number) + ‘5’ (string) will be ‘55’ (string). It will not be 10.
Any time you decide to work on a large project, you definitely need TypeScript to find bugs and fix them. Fixing errors in JavaScript is very difficult. It’s hard to identify where the errors are, and even more difficult to fix them without messing up other parts of your code.
JavaScript is better in a sense that it gives you freedom and ability to improvise. TypeScript is much more fixed and errors are easy to fix.
TypeScript with front-end frameworks
Because TypeScript is necessary for maintaining a large scale project, all three major JavaScript frameworks – React, Vue, and Angular support TypeScript.
Angular has always supported TypeScript, and it’s impossible to write Angular applications with normal JavaScript.
React and Vue are compatible with normal JavaScript, but the use of TypeScript is highly encouraged, especially in React, according to SimpleFrontEnd. For the past few years, most of commercial web application development in React is done with TypeScript.
Vue tries to stick with the traditional approach of writing web applications in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. However, with the release of Vue 3, this front-end framework has also developed a solid support for TypeScript.
An important difference
Some people claim that JavaScript is an object-oriented language, but it’s not a clear conclusion. TypeScript, on the other hand, clearly follows an object-oriented pattern. Like its sister language JavaScript, TypeScript defines what you can and can not do through prototypes.