Title: I have been using TypeScript for a few years now, and I haven&#x27;t yet been convinced that I would choose to use it if I had the choice; not just for my own personal projects but for large scale applications where the codebase is shared with many developers.<p>I want to skip over the static typing benefits argument, because I think it is well understood that static typing is a good thing and if we could bless JavaScript with a built-in and robust typing system then I don&#x27;t think many people would be against that. My issue is with the amount of extra work it places on developers, much of it the &quot;dumb&quot; kind of work which can eat up hours and doesn&#x27;t deliver all that much value.<p>i) Like a framework, you are at the whim of TS devs as it gets updated (edited)<p>For example, a new package you install can require a new TypesScript version. Once installed, you then may need to update your source code. This can place quite a high tax on the developer, where perhaps a 10 minute change becomes hours long.<p>ii) Libraries are badly documented<p>Most libraries do not document their types, or have no examples using TypeScript. Some worst offenders: Apollo, Protobufjs. The type definitions exported by these libraries can be large and complex, and the error messages emitted by TypeScript are so long and cryptic the result is often a drawn out process of trial and error along with trawling through source files.<p>iii) Error messages are hard to follow<p>Errors are long and don&#x27;t provide enough detail. They will explain a type mismatch referencing many types you may not have ever seen, and are not documented anywhere. Except for simple errors, many of them are very hard to follow to a remedy.<p>iv) It requires yet more transpilation<p>Transpilation takes time, and always adds a burden to developers. I didn&#x27;t mind so much with ES6 etc because eventually many functions were included in a broad set of browsers. There doesn&#x27;t seem to be much progress including TypeScript in a browser, and feels like these complicated transpilation steps could be with us for a long time.<p>I could probably add more to this list, but my point is that I just can&#x27;t see that TypeScript is worth all this time investment and making progress so slow sometimes. Are there others that come to this conclusion? I mainly see positive posts about TypeScript.<p>edit: I referred to TypeScript as a framework which it isn&#x27;t. However it feels similar to me in that you are at the whim of TypeScript developers and how they decide to progress with the language.
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