If you happenend to work in one of these areas, it’s worth giving TypeScript a shot. And if you

3 min readDec 5, 2020

Every craft has a set of tools that are needed to do the work. This is especially true in software development. Jeff Bezos has a great quote that says: “We first change our tools and then our tools change us.” Without tools, developers wouldn’t be able to do get their work done as efficiently.

The key difference between JavaScript and TypeScript, however, is the type checker. Upon compilation, every TypeScript-program gets checked on whether the data types are consistent with one another.

There are a few other differences, like the fact that TypeScript has anonymous functions and asynchronous functions. Anonymous functions are a key feature of functional programming, which can make a program more efficient with big data loads.

About a decade ago, software engineers at Microsoft noticed that JavaScript wasn’t meeting all their needs any more. On the one hand, the language was evolving rapidly and adding extremely interesting new features. On the other hand, none of the features in the pipeline could solve one fundamental problem: JavaScript was great for small programs, but writing whole applications with it was a mess.

Many data scientists deal with asynchronous and parallel programming. You might already be considering writing your next project in TypeScript rather than Python. Whether that’s a good idea depends on many other factors, though.
Of course I’m not saying that JavaScript is always great, or that static typing is always the best way of doing things. But for building large Microsoft-style applications, this seems to work extremely well.
That leaves parallel programming and asynchronous programming on the table. Even though you can pull both of these things off in both languages, there is a big difference: in Python, you need to use particular libraries for the task. In TypeScript, all libraries are asynchronous from the core. And since the latter is a bit more functional by default, it’s often a tiny bit easier to do parallel programming.

On the other hand, Python has been adding more and more features of functional programming, too. And when it comes to data science, machine learning, and more, Python is at the forefront of frontiers.

Similarly to Python, JavaScript is compiled at runtime, meaning that you need to run the code to debug it. TypeScript, on the other hand, is compiled. This provides an extra layer of safety because programmers get information about possible bugs before execution time. With non-compiled languages like Python or JavaScript, it can be quite time-consuming to locate bugs once you’ve realized that your code isn’t behaving as expected.

Features like generics and static typing make it easier to do functional programming in TypeScript than in Python. This could be an advantage because demand for functional code is growing due to developments in data science, parallel programming, asynchronous programming, and more.

Despite its young age, there are fields where TypeScript is inevitable. This adds to its popularity. For example, when Google announced that Angular.js would run with TypeScript in 2016, the number of tags on StackOverflow exploded.Asynchronous programming is extremely useful when you need to perform multiple operations in parallel, or when you’re dealing with I/O operations that shouldn’t interrupt background processes. Asynchronous programming is possible in Python and Javascript, but in TypeScript it’s built in from the core.What made JavaScript popular back in the days is that it runs everywhere. You can run it on a server or in your browser or wherever you like. You compile it once, and it works everywhere. When that first came out, it almost seemed like magic.

If you happenend to work in one of these areas, it’s worth giving TypeScript a shot. And if you

Written by kedernath