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The good: The Monaco editor component that Microsoft paid a lot of money is now under MIT license. (bought the company from Switzerland) The bad: they refactor
by frik 11y ago
The good: The Monaco editor component that Microsoft paid a lot of money is now under MIT license. (bought the company from Switzerland)
The bad: they refactored it to TypeScript (from Javascript)
The ugly: the sole existence of TypeScript and some ES6 syntax is the monaco editor project and Visual Studio Online and Visual Studio Code is a fork of it.
- tomp 11y agoWhy is refactoring code from JavaScript to TypeScript a bad thing? Short of using a better, but non-web-compatible language, I don't really see a better option.
- softawre 11y agoRight. It's a good thing IMO. Even for pure Javascript, VSCode has some of the best code-completion I've seen (outside of Visual Studio).
- frik 11y agoDo you remember CoffeeScript?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- eropple 11y agoI think reasonable people can probably agree that there is a difference in kind between CoffeeScript and TypeScript. CoffeeScript was functionally equivalent to JavaScript, whereas TypeScript has feature-level improvements that are worth a developer's time. Sure, TypeScript is pushed by Microsoft. It's also an excellent solution for large-scale systems, its adoption is nontrivial, and Microsoft has a history of supporting its tools (Managed C++ aside, I suppose) in a way that can offer a promise of consistency on its own.
- mmebane 11y agoMicrosoft has also been doing a good job of keeping TypeScript aligned as JavaScript++ by absorbing ES6 features into the language. I was initially worried that TypeScript would be a fork of JavaScript and eventually diverge enough that it was painful to use, but there aren't any signs of that happening yet.
- cballard 11y ago"was"? What happened to Coffeescript, is it dead now?
- trbn 11y ago"Hey, I created this program in Java!" "Do you remember C++?" You seems like I guy that's really pleasing to discuss programming languages with.
- ethomson 11y agoMonaco was not an acquisition. Microsoft hired Erich Gamma, who built a team in Switzerland to develop Monaco (and later Visual Studio Code). Visual Studio Code is not a fork of Visual Studio Online. Visual Studio Online (now Visual Studio Team Services) is not a text editor, it's an ALM system.
- m_st 11y agoPersonally (!) I don't agree with your negative points. We refactored a JS SPA to TypeScript and couldn't be happier about it. So that 'bad' point is fixed. They use TypeScript also for the TFS web interface, on premise and online and are very happy with the result. There an article on bharrys blog on MSDN about that. So that 'ugly' point is fixed. Is there really anything bad about TypeScript?
- markusbrutus 11y agoHow about it's tainted with the Microsoft association? Even the appearance of the string "Microsoft" is enough to produce a very visceral reaction to many people. They may suppress it alright and even try to convince themselves that maybe _this time_ Microsoft really has changed but the reaction is there and, like I said, very visceral. The attempts of TypeScript or F# to distance themselves as much as possible from Microsoft speak volumes. And BTW last time I checked Microsoft was still trying to push its MS Office abomination to schools and colleges as part of some "curriculum". That's equivalent to brain-raping kids in my book.
- adam12 11y agoI fail to see how refactoring to Typescript is a negative thing. It outputs beautiful Javascript. So now, they have Typescript which helps them immensely while developing, plus they have a better version of the Javascript code they started with.