This item is a work in progress. It is subject to change radically at any time—up to and including being deleted entirely if I change my mind about it! Because it is a draft, it is not included in the site’s feeds; if you want to watch its progress, you will need to do that very old thing and bookmark this page and return to it over time until it is published.
Given its preliminary, work-in-progress status, I would appreciate it very much if you do not share this to social media, Hacker News, etc.—call it part of the contract for “working with the garage door open”. Thanks!
Assumed audience: People with at least a passing interesting in one of: TypeScript or long-term open source software development. No technical knowledge required, and particularly no Ember knowledge or interest required.
In December 2016, I started working on unofficial support for TypeScript in Ember. This week, some 6½ years later, we crossed a really remarkable milestone: official support for TypeScript in Ember has landed and is “stable”. I wrote up details for Ember users in the announcement blog post; this blog post is focused on a bit of meta-level reflection about the journey here.
When I started working on TypeScript support for Ember, I was distinctly not “qualified” for the job. I had been working in Ember for less than a year, and I had been writing TypeScript at all for a whopping two or three months. I was not coming from nowhere, to be fair: unlike many folks in the front-end world, I had spent a lot of time over the first five years of my career writing a mix of typed languages (including C, C++, and Fortran — yes, Fortran), and since 2015 had been mucking around with Rust, Haskell, Elm, PureScript, F#, and so on. Types were not new to me. But TypeScript was!
It was not ego but desperation, though. I knew — from Rust and Elm especially — that there were many, many bugs in our app that simply did not have to be there. I also knew, from my attempt starting a few months earlier to add types to our app using Flow, that these languages could catch a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of those kinds of bugs.1 I was sick to death of the bugs that I knew Flow or TypeScript could catch. So I just… started.
I had no idea — really, no idea — how much work I had signed myself up for; I also had no idea just how satisfying it would be, or how much it would change the trajectory of my career.
Notes
I started out looking at Flow instead of TypeScript because, when I started looking at it, Flow had features TS did not that were hard necessities for Ember support — and because, unlike TS, it did actually aim to be a sound type system. But I concluded, once TS got the relevant features, that between Microsoft and Facebook, Microsoft was the team to bet on in terms of successfully driving a programming language forward. Facebook’s track record was already a bit spotty on that front, whereas Microsoft had decades of experience in exactly that space. That choice looks obviously correct in retrospect — but it was distinctly not obvious at the time: Flow was a real competitor and some of its choices really pushed TypeScript to reevaluate some of its earlier decisions. ↩︎