David Heinemeier Hansson

Turbo 8 is dropping TypeScript from the next big release of Turbo 8. Microsoft's TypeScript has been a big success for Microsoft. It's simply our good fortune that we now have such a capable JavaScript, which browsers are able to interpret without any need for a compiler at all.

Turbo 8 is dropping TypeScript

I’ll put aside two important details: My dislike for DHH’s behaviour, and my preference for TS over naked JS. There are other more interesting aspects to debate about this sudden change:
<ul>
<li>The PR was approved only 3h after it was submitted (and it was a huge one). There was no time for a proper review.</li>
<li>The PR not only stripped typescript’s types, it also introduced changes breaking the API: new files, marking stuff that was previously public as private, …</li>
<li>There was no community debate prior to this (I’m not pointing this out in reference to the move against TS, but in reference to the changes in the exposed API).</li>
<li>Many pending PRs that relied on those types were immediately broken, dozens or hundreds of hours of work of many people were thrown away as if they were worth nothing.</li>
<li>“Soft features” such as autocompletion, intellisense, and other “linter goodies” are gone for many developers… and no mitigation measure (such as relying on JSDoc, or at least exporting minimal .d.ts files) has been put in place.</li>
</ul>
DHH does what he always does. He is the guy who banned talking about politics in his company (a movement that led 1/3 of his employees to leave the company), and RoR community is infamous for its rigid way of doing things.
It’s a hot topic, but the facts alone are enough by themselves to see why it’s a bad idea to rely on anything this man works on (and this is independent of whether you like TS or not).

WHY, WHY DO DHH POSTS SHOW UP ON MY FEED I HAVE BLOCKED HIM 10+ TIMES.

I must be an oddball… I like the idea of strongly-typed languages, but I also see the use and appeal of dynamic languages. Maybe this is because my first languages were C++ and C, then Java–all nearly 20 years before I got into the industry. And now I work primarily in Groovy (but “with types”)…
I’ve had moments of frustration, and thankfulness, for the typing system. This is especially true with work where I don’t think we could “do without types.” Yet I really dig Ruby for just about anything else I’d work on; it’s arguably my 4th language as I don’t know a lick of C/C++ these days. I’ve even used Ruby to prototype a system I ended up writing in Groovy for work. I think I even prefer the Ruby implementation.
Javascript, however, does not get the same love from me. I’m not sure why, but pure, vanilla Javascript just doesn’t do it for me. Maybe it’s because I didn’t “grow up” with it as a programmer. Maybe it’s because I “grew up” with it being that thing you had to enable or disable depending on the website you were on…
All this to say, I’m not “drawn strongly” to either. And I think “the correct choice” is whichever works for the job at hand.

okay I’ll bite, wtf is Turbo 8?

I’m not a user of Turbo but there’s a huge backlash from the community on removing TS and just changing it based on “making it easier to read” is very disappointing. I think DHH should have waited a bit more before making this decision as it does affect a lot of other libraries using it
Relevant PR here <a href="https://github.com/hotwired/turbo/pull/971" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">https://github.com/hotwired/turbo/pull/971</a>