My comment was indeed a little edgy, I have my reasons for that. But the intent was not a personal attack, although I now see that some of the words used were indeed on that edge.
I see in the history of your comments that it is not normal for you to ban an account just right away without any warning. I have no clue why you made this exception for me, I see much worse around on HN. My account was never blocked btw, it's still working. Feel free to try to block it again if you wish so, I won't use it anymore anyways.
I truly hoped I was able to shed a light on things many people normally don't see, the intent was positive but apparently I failed to do so rightly. I am human and cannot promise to always be kind. Therefore this better concludes my contribution to HN. Wishing you all the best.
It would definitely help if you tell me which rule I broke that made you ban this throw away account in the first place. Without that I think it's more convenient for me to create a new account instead of sending an email as you suggest.
> It’s always people first, code is a far distant second.
I'm afraid that's kinda political. In order to get the migration successful, hmm.. I assume developers did not have much of a choice, either accept it or leave. You can try to brainwash them by impose your subjective point of view in a friendly way, but in the end it's all about power, that's the untold story.
If you've learned to appreciate the elegance, expressive power, readability and overall speed of development of Coffeescript, tell me, are you going to drop that for some virtual type safety that doesn't even exist at runtime? There's no way you'll write a medium to large codebase in TS without the use of 'any' or 'undefined', otherwise you'll get completely stuck. Don't believe the hype.
When you are not writing critical code where lives or huge amounts of money depend on, then I'd say stick to Coffeescript. And when you find a type related bug in your code, fix it and write a test so the bug cannot occur again. Otherwise, first check out Elm, Dart and Livescript. TS is really the last on my list, I've had my share of pain there.
> Reading my old code, I was surprised by how clean it looks. How easy it is to digest. There is a certain sense of calm when your brain doesn't have to process all the visual clutter of a C-style syntax. I miss that.
Indeed, Coffeescript is one of the finest languages I wrote in. Consider that 95% of the time we are reading code, what is the win of TS with a linter? The TS codebases I've worked on really hurt my eyes and brain, and that for some stupid website where type safety hardly makes any difference at all. And all those average web developers I've worked with bragging about type safety while the code they are producing is full of wrong constructs, bad naming, dependent on heavy tooling, etc..
> Yes, we were adding TypeScript code, but we were adding CoffeeScript at a faster rate.
Unsurprisingly.
> how do we get our coworkers to buy in to this new paradigm?
By forcing them?
> and we’re all happy to spend hours figuring out exactly how we’ll set up our TypeScript config.
Oh yes what a joy!
> our data access layer (“ORM”) is ubiquitous, and most files use it in some way.
Use SQL instead, it's better.
> We also made tooling and configuration a priority.
Of course, there's no way to go down the TS rabbit hole without it!
> Finally, we converged on a set of agreed upon linting rules
The code soup that's generated with the 'airbnb' setting, I know it's a terrible read.
> When we began analyzing TypeScript adoption patterns, it became clear that using TypeScript wasn’t a seamless process for our engineers, who would often need to import special utilities (ts-node/register) or create intermediate CoffeeScript files that did nothing but import their TypeScript equivalents.
How productive!
> We avoided using any in this phase, instead opting for the stricter unknown.
Yes, the dream of type safety ends with using 'any' or 'unknown'. But are you sure only in this phase? I've never seen a TS codebase without it!
> Tackling a migration like this means asking your teammates to give up a way of doing their jobs that they’re comfortable and effective with
So tell me, no one left because they didn't like to have the joy sucked out of their lives?
> To do this we created a #typescript channel in Slack, and made sure developers getting stuck could get unblocked.
Another great addition to the workflow. But you mean 'stuck' like you cannot continue building because of TS? I only hear from TS proponents that it improves productivity?
> From the beginning, we knew that bulk, overnight migration was not a possibility, and that it would likely take a year or more to complete the process.
Ok, so more than a year with the entire team to kill a few type related bugs? How did you have to lie to get this agreed upon by the CEO?
> As we continue with this migration, we hope to keep learning, and to use this knowledge to make the next big project even easier.
Yes, keep learning because soon TS will be exit with the upcoming WebAssembly and you can start all over again in another hyped language or framework.
But for the record, instead of fixing a few type errors a once in a while and create proper tests for it, you went rewriting the entire app and fucking up your entire dev team that were happy with Coffeescript? I'm also really curious how much this entire operation has cost the company, and what the actual benefits are? Is it that the dev now can hover with his mouse over a variable see the related type? Or is the app really looking and working much better now? Always when I worked on a TS project the benefits were mostly imaginary and the pain real. Unfortunately there are way too many inexperienced web developers that think they look incredibly smart doing TS.. Vanity is a thing. Doing a dynamically typed language is for the poor minds that don't understand type safety, not? You are all way smarter than Brendan Eich I guess.
I can imagine corporations totally like the idea of users not being able to save their own precious data to a file. In the end they want to own and control your data as much as possible for profit and power. And they sell that idea by telling you it's more convenient. As if it were not possible to create great file management tools or maybe even your own files as a database that you can manage easily.
Same with the 'cloud'. What's the difference between running your own FTP server and a cloud server? Technically not that much IMAO, only the latter means the data is controlled by some corporation running that server. And why is there hardly any progress in the area of building a private turn-key 'cloud' server so you don't need gmail, dropbox, github, etc..? I'm sure it can be made, easy to setup, robust, with backup, you name it, just like a Mac pc that's made for non technical people. We know how to build it, but we don't do it, we build for corporations instead.
The further we go down this road the less control we will have, and the ramifications of that don't look pretty to me to say the least.
The scheme behind the lack of downwards compatibility was always a pain with OSX. It's great for the app developers because they can offer you a paid upgrade to a new compatible version. But UX wise it's so bad it makes you consider moving to another OS.
I once had ProTools on a MacPro and found it out the hard way. I thought I could just upgrade to the next OSX version like with almost any other OS. But after the upgrade many apps including ProTools didn't work anymore and could only get up an running again after paying thousands of euro's to upgrade not only ProTools, also all it's plugins and a lot of other unrelated apps as well. That was my last MacPro, and I never bought and never will buy any OSX app again.
I don't have accessibility issues and I don't make this up. I've seen comments with a text color of #eee, I had to go into the inspector to make it readable.. Maybe that has been changed/fixed already which would make my entire comment pointless indeed. Personally I think grey out text should not exceed about #ccc.
You mean when a comment is not readable anymore it is 'marking' instead of censoring? So if China hides peoples opinion it is 'marking', like being a good thing? I don't get this.
This definitely applies to HN. HN should not grey out down voted comments. It is like there is no freedom of thought and speech on HN. If many people don't like what you're saying your idea gets censored while it might be very true. That is inherently wrong IMHO.
edit: HN, why not just showing how many up and down votes a comment gets? I am really curious why someones comment should be invisible. Sometimes I'm reading replies on a comment I cannot read because it's down voted, what's the point of it?
Excuse me for the misunderstanding, I live in Europe where middle and high school are one. It is not compulsory anymore after reaching 18yrs old or after getting a diploma.
Still then, having a high school diploma doesn't make any difference at all in the job market, it's a worthless paper most people never need. Almost everything learned in middle and high school is worth 0$, while in real life pretty much only the dollars count. When people come to my company looking for a job I only hire them when they have the skill and are nice persons to be around, I'm not interested in whatever diploma or certificates.
Because it's mandatory, and you are forced to be around lots of people you don't really want to be with. You are forced to learn things you are not interested in at all, while being punished for not performing well. And all that, while your body goes through a major transformation sexually. There can only be very few people enjoying that. For most it is a horrible way to end their childhood.
And we (parents, governments) think it is beneficial, until the kids come from middle school and cannot find a job that easily, often ending up doing completely stupid work like cashier or whatever else for the rest of their lives.
If you want to present yourself as an alternative for FB's libra, this is way too cheap. Even the worst alt coins have a better website and more info.
> Our core team and community
I mean, how can anyone take this serious? The core team could easily be just 1 person in the list. And the 'community', are that some far relatives who said "yeah good idea!"?
The website is made within an hour or so, writing the text has taken longer for sure. This is a scam. Just some smart guys trying to launch and cash in on an alt coin that is a made up solution for FB's libra coin.
I've quit Adobe when they moved to the cloud, what a horrible scheme. Now I'm using Inkscape already for years for all my digital graphics work. It's not on par with Illustrator, but still an amazing open source project we should cherish.
The lack of money gives people with lower income a problem that the brain cannot solve. Not everyone can 'just get a job' that easily. I've experienced periods in my life where I kept thinking in circles to find a way to get some money for our basic needs. The only solution was to simply keep trying and waiting for some luck or fate. Of course that fucks your brain! I knew a professor in Berlin who was living in the streets, homeless. Try to imagine his mind. After all his work, passion and skill this simple but ridiculous money problem is in-solvable. And no one will help him, he is lost for life. Most rich people have no clue about this problem. They think everybody can work and create a future, while at the same time this professor in the streets has no chances. Who has a thinking problem here?
My comment was indeed a little edgy, I have my reasons for that. But the intent was not a personal attack, although I now see that some of the words used were indeed on that edge.
I see in the history of your comments that it is not normal for you to ban an account just right away without any warning. I have no clue why you made this exception for me, I see much worse around on HN. My account was never blocked btw, it's still working. Feel free to try to block it again if you wish so, I won't use it anymore anyways.
I truly hoped I was able to shed a light on things many people normally don't see, the intent was positive but apparently I failed to do so rightly. I am human and cannot promise to always be kind. Therefore this better concludes my contribution to HN. Wishing you all the best.