Tech Drama

My goodness, there is some drama happening in the software dev world right now. It all started about two days ago when DHH tweeted out some, uh, out of pocket things about TypeScript in the TypeScript community. Even wrote a blog post about it. If you don't know who DHH is, he's the creator of Ruby on Rails and a maintainer and owner of a couple of pretty popular open source projects. So he's a pretty big name in the space. He's also known for some pretty contrarian opinions. Now, if it was just an opinion this time, it would just kinda fizzle out. But the issue here is that he pretty recklessly merged the PR removing TypeScript from a pretty popular open source project named Turbo. See this PR removing TypeScript. Link to the blog post. Posts some comments saying this is probably not a good idea. And how does DHH respond? Well, he disregarded all the comments and merged the PR anyway. Fully recognized that TypeScript offers some people some advantages, but to my eyes, the benefits are evident in this PR. The code not only reads much better, it's also freed of the type wrangling and gymnastics needed to please the TS compiler. We write all our client side code at 37signals now in pure JavaScript and the same too with any internal libraries. This is going to bring that in line. All the love and appreciation to contributors who would prefer TypeScript. This is one of those debates where arguments aren't likely to move anyone's fundamental position, so I won't attempt to do that. So I'm gonna merge this into the merge. Happens right here, two days ago. Now we got a lot of tech influencers speaking out in favor of TypeScript. Tech influencers with the likes of Rich Harris, removing types from your own code is clownish, epically misguided behavior, but whatever — to each their own. Removing types from a library THAT OTHER PEOPLE HAVE TO USE, however, is just user-hostile dickwaddery. Prime, of course, chiming in with some sarcasm. Me, types are the way. Rich, JS docs to TypeScript. DHH, Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading '0'). I'm thankful for DHH. Incompetent engineers love to defend his terrible decisions. Great way to identify people you should ignore. He created T3 stack and he's pushing TypeScript quite heavily. He actually put a poll request up to try to add TypeScript back into the repository. Generally a lot of thumbs up and support for this move. And of course, lots of LGTMs. How does DHH respond? Well, he just closes the PR without so much as a comment. Prime has to come in here being prime. He even made a video on this, titling it, The DHH Problem. Let's watch this for a few seconds. Still out here explaining why DHH is being stupid. Daniel Fasalo came out and said, if you dislike DHH, you should unfollow me. He's one of the larger accounts on Twitter, but there are some other people in support of DHH. I don't know about you, but this drama is mwah, delicious. If you're interested in this, give me a follow. I'll be covering it.