TypeScript Fundamentals

In this episode of Syntax, Scott and Wes talk about TypeScript fundamentals — what it is, how you use it, why people love it so much, and more!

Sanity - Sponsor

Sanity.io is a real-time headless CMS with a fully customizable Content Studio built in React. Get a Sanity powered site up and running in minutes at sanity.io/create. Get an awesome supercharged free developer plan on sanity.io/syntax.

LogRocket - Sponsor

LogRocket lets you replay what users do on your site, helping you reproduce bugs and fix issues faster. It’s an exception tracker, a session re-player and a performance monitor. Get 14 days free at logrocket.com/syntax.

Cloudinary - Sponsor

Cloudinary is the best way to manage images and videos in the cloud. Edit and transform for any use case, from performance to personalization, using Cloudinary’s APIs, SDKs, widgets, and integrations.

Show Notes

What is TypeScript?

03:12 - Types?

What are types and why should you care?
JS is a typed language, it’s just not strongly typed
- JS does not care about reassignment of a variable to a new type
- Does not care about your types, but they do exist

06:34 - The Fundamentals

You write your JavaScript code, but each time you create a variable, function, parameter, you “type it” — which means you describe what that data will look like.
- Create a variable: Will it be a string? A number? A custom type of show?
- Create a function: What params does it take? What type are they? What does it return?
Types allow your code to know if there are type errors that would present themselves to the user silently. These are small errors that can be compounded and go unnoticed.
- This can allow you to prevent shipping code that has these errors by checking your code.
- Some of the biggest benefits here come via errors in your text editor

13:30 - Explaining the types

You can create your own types
Strings
Numbers
- We only have numbers in TS, no floats/ints
- We do have BigInt though, but not something most people will use
Arrays
- Will be a list of another type
Unions
- This type will be one of the possible options
- String of DRAFT PUBLISHED or ARCHIVED
Intersections
- An intersection type combines multiple types into one
Objects
- These are custom types where each property is its own type
Any
- Explicit any
- Implicit any
Language types
- These things are technically just Objects, but they have their own types
- Dates
- Timeouts
- DOM Elements / Nodes
Void
- When a function returns nothing — usually used with side effects like click handlers
Enum
- A set of named constants
  - Used when you have a select amount of values — I like to think of these as the select lists of TS
  - String unions are also used for this same thing

30:28 - Inference

Automatic detection of types
Typescript will try to infer your types based on their definition
Not every type can be inferred, leading to implicit anys and the need for explicit types

33:25 - Getting types

Most popular packages already have types — you install them like npm i @types/whatever
If a package doesn’t have types, you have to create them yourself, which can be annoying
- MakeTypes
- Console log a JSON.stringify(obj), and pipe it in
Node has types
Vanilla JS has types, for the language and all of the DOM - HTMLInputElement
React has types
Typing Node modules that don’t have types

Overall benefits

40:39 - Type hinting

With TS and your editor (VSCode) you’ll get more information about your code as you type it — allowing you to know exactly what things expect
- This seems like a small deal but in practice leads to being much more efficient

42:50 - Refactoring

Rename a function, type, or variable and it will be updated everywhere in the project!
Moving a function to a new file is actually part of TypeScript
Drag + Drop file, update imports

48:10 - Compiling

TSC vs Babel / Esbuild
Only TSC type checks
Compiling TS with babel will not allow you to break the build on type errors, you’ll need to run TSC in coordination or in the CI/CD