The Need for TypeScript-first Beginner Learning Content
If search for “web development tutorial” in January 2022, one of the first results is a front-end learning roadmap from W3 Schools. It lists HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as the basics of web development. TypeScript is only mentioned once as a step up from JavaScript. So, if I was a beginner again looking into getting into web development, I would see this roadmap and immediately start learning JavaScript.
This is a problem because JavaScript is a horrible language for learning. It’s weird cases like an empty string being false only confuses people.
Someone completely new to programming and is learning vanilla JavaScript will eventually run into a bug that will make them question their ability to learn programming. Chances are that bug will be related to the wrong type of data being passed around somewhere because JavaScript is not type-safe. Nevertheless, if I was in that person’s shoes, I’d assume all
programming is like this and simply quit.
Now, there is a easy way to avoid this — teach people TypeScript first regardless of their programming experience.
TypeScript:
- is a superset of JavaScript. If you learn TypeScript, you know JavaScript.
- is type-safe. If you make a type error, the TypeScript compiler will let you know how to fix it before it goes into production.
- is flexible. You can use as little TypeScript as you want (not recommended though).
- teaches computer data types to people that otherwise would never know what they are. This is very transferable knowledge.
- is adopted by countless companies. It is worth adding to your resume.
New and experienced developers benefit from TypeScript features, there are little to no reasons to not use it.
The one issue with learning TypeScript is that it takes more effort to set up. This requires introducing concepts such as compilers and transpilers and the tooling (e.g. Babel) to the beginner which can be overwhelming if not done carefully.
That said, setting up a TypeScript project is much easier than setting up a Java project and understanding what the hell a JVM is. The reason I call out Java is because, in many intro classrooms is the past and current day, Java was the intro to programming language of choice and people still managed to make it through that.
What to do?
We know there is a lack of beginner TypeScript content on the web. There is only way to solve that issue.
Make quality content and tutorials for beginners in TypeScript.
That’s it. I believe such content has the ability to be of higher quality and effectiveness than what currently exists, so I intend to make web development tutorials and guides for complete beginners in TypeScript. If you’re a web dev educator, you should too.
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