What is TypeScript?

TypeScript is a programming language developed by Microsoft in 2012. Its main ambition is to improve the productivity of complex application development. It is an open source language developed as a superset of JavaScript. What this means, in simple terms is that any valid JavaScript code is also valid to TypeScript.

What advantages offers TypeScript over JavaScript?

In terms of software development, TypeScript offers:

• Optional static typing. JavaScript is a dynamically typed language, which means that types are checked, and data type errors are only detected at runtime. This can be very dangerous and can create errors during production.

• TypeScript introduces optional strong static typing: once declared, a variable does not change its type and can only take specific values.

• Readability. Thanks to the addition of strict types and other elements that make the code more self-expressive, you can see the design intent of the developers who originally wrote the code. This is especially important for distributed teams working on the same project. A code that speaks for itself can compensate for the lack of direct communication between team members.

• IDE support. Type information renders editors and integrated development environments (IDEs) much more useful. They can offer features like code navigation and auto-complete, providing accurate suggestions.

• The power of object-orientation. TypeScript supports Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) concepts such as classes, interfaces, inheritance, etc. The OOP paradigm makes it easier to build well-organized scalable code, and this advantage becomes more apparent as your project grows in size and complexity.

• The support of a talented community. Behind TypeScript is a massive community of very gifted people working day by day to improve the language.

• Integrated support for updated versions of ECMAScript, which is the scripting language that forms the basis of JavaScript.

• ECMAScript defines the standards and novelties of JavaScript. TypeScript takes great care to include all these new features with each update.

How to migrate the website from JavaScript to TypeScript?

It has been a bit of a dilemma, because at first I wanted to redo the whole site from scratch. Talking to a couple of people who already have a lot of experience with TypeScript, they recommended me to migrate the configurations and then fix the errors that were coming out because of the famous any. So I changed the configuration, the truth following the NextJs documentation was quite simple, in fact even much of the work is done by the framework itself.

Once this was done, the red festival began. In almost all the components I had to add things because it marked me that I had an any. I have also been able to use interfaces and it was not until I migrated the internal project of the cryptocurrency price list where I saw the ease that the TS brings us. I remember that when I was developing the project, I had to resort thousands of times to the official API page to consult what was returned.

Thanks to make the migration I was able to find a bug in my Tic Tac Toe project, which apparently was due to my bad way of developing the project in JS.

Conclusion

I can say that I have fallen in love with TypeScript and that everything I'm going to do from now on I'm going to try to do with it. I have a few projects in mind that I want to give them a hand, but with TypeScript.