TypeScript *

(originally published on Medium)

I like writing React code. This might be an odd introduction to a story about Vue, but you need to understand my background to understand why I’m here discussing Vue.

I like writing React code and I hate reading it. JSX is a neat idea for assembling the pieces together fast, Material-UI is amazing solution for bootstrapping your next startup’s UI, computing CSS from JS constants allows you to be very flexible. Yet reading your old JSXs feels awful – even with scrupulous code review practices you might scratch your head not once as you try to figure the intricate nesting of the components.

I’ve heard many things about Vue—the not so new kid on the block—and I finally decided to get my feet wet; bringing in all my mental luggage of React and Polymer (and Angular, but let’s not talk about that).

When my friend and I were of school age and aspiring to become software developers, we daydreamed of designing some cool stuff together – like a game or a mega-useful app.

I chose to learn C++ and C#, he picked JavaScript. We finished school, graduated from our universities, served in the army and started our jobs. We had a pretty busy time in industrial software engineering, with lots of different jobs and positions, and after it all started to wear on us, we recalled where it all had begun.

Having finally got together as mature developers, we decided to work on our own project – a 2D video game. Since my friend’s domain was front-end and I was a full-stack developer, our immediate choice of development platform was an Internet browser. As I was only used to working with TypeScript when designing front-end, we thought, ok, no problem, after all, TS is just JavaScript at scale. Let’s use it and things will go smoothly. If I only knew how wrong I was! When we started discussing the project, we ran into an extensive chasm of misunderstanding between us.