What are you saying David Heinemeier Hansson has done now?
The creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of Basecamp has once again ignited a holy war, this time against TypeScript.
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David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) is known for being the creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of Basecamp. However, he is also known for stirring up controversies such as “TDD is Dead.” Now, in his latest outburst, he has targeted TypeScript and left contributors high and dry.
The case that sparked the uproar involves the Turbo library from the Hotwire project. This library originates from Basecamp and aims to accelerate the performance of web applications by manipulating navigation and page interactions without the need to reload the entire page. On September 6th, all traces of TypeScript were removed from the repository, along with a letter from DHH to the community explaining the reasons. The content of the letter was primarily ideological and shown a lack of understanding of TypeScript itself.
Turbo is not the only library that has recently stopped using TypeScript in its source code. Another recent example is Svelte. However, in this case, the decision was made for practical rather than ideological reasons, and with a good understanding of how TypeScript works and what it brings to the table. Svelte has also been more considerate of the community when making the transition. A summary of their motivation can be found in the following post.
DHH being disrespectful to contributors
Setting aside the reasons for eliminating type annotations, the main criticism leveled at DHH is that he has left Turbo’s contributors in the lurch. The transition was made without warning the…
