One hundred percent this. It reeks of the kind of ego you get from devs that think their code is so perfect it's inherently easily maintainable.

I know junior devs that don't struggle with types and unit testing—any dev that thinks they're too good for either is immediately sub-junior in my assessment, because they're clearly unable to write code intended to be maintained by a team.

Lmao I’ve literally had conversations with people who have asked me to not be as rigorous with unit tests because you have to change some tests when you make a modification to the business logic.

Bro: that’s the fucking point.

Can't be a 10x developer if you keep spending your time writing unit tests.

I hate it's syntax. I have no problem with typed languaged like java and c#

I love unit tests but I hate the eternal struggle behind them.

We should make unit tests so we can tell when the build runs that the app is going to be consistent

Everyone cheers

We lose a sprint setting up unit tests

Oh this one test just went yellow, somebody spends a few hours figuring it out and finds that it's a bug in the unit test. No no we're good That's just a bug in the unit test we'll plan to fix that in the next Sprint.

Oh look now this unit test is going red we're blocked. 2 hours later they find out that it's a real problem but it's not so bad that it overrides current feature work. Well we're going to need to override that and we'll have to fix it in the next sprint.

Unit test failures slowly degrade in priority to try to get feature work done. You end up with a backlog full of yellow and red known problems and no one pays any attention to you that tests anymore.

I think it’s more of a JSDoc > TS thing. I need to check the drama, but I don’t believe anyone would want to write vanilla JS without some type declarations..

For your Go code to be useful, you've got to set up the Go compiler right?

As much as I wouldn't recommend it, you can even install the typescript compiler via an OS package manager (at least in most Debian distributions)

At that point (and once you've added it to your makefile, or however else you're triggering your go build), surely then there's zero additional moving parts needed to compile your front end vs your backend?

Not least of all, I'd argue having a compiler tell me I messed up immediately is a bonus too vs poking around for some time until I get an error in the JS console

You are making a lot of false assumptions about typescript and bringing in a lot of outside problems that don't have anything to do with the language. Try working with typescript. It is a strict super set of javascript. So if you like vanilla JS, you can just keep writing it, then slowly introduce the syntactic sugar that typescript provides. I did the javascript and coffee script thing for a long while, and typescript is just the better way for most use cases at this point.

I usually write Typescript with Vue and SSR so my server and client are using the same tooling. If I was writing a basic frontend with minimal JavaScript I would just (and have) use jsdoc for typing.

But let's be fair, what you mentioned as dependencies are development dependencies and don't impact the end user (outside of poorly optimized build systems causing issues). Build systems can have some great benefits. Such as reducing file size by utilizing methods such as tree shaking to prune out the unused classes in a CSS library.

It just comes down to choosing the tools to suit the job. Sure, you can use a table saw to cut a stick but it's probably easier just to use a handsaw. Whereas if you're cutting a large plywood board you could make do with a handsaw but it'll take longer and the result might not be pretty.