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"Even if I have been writing code with Java / C# for nearly a decade , nothing has come close to Typescript in terms of productivity,flexibility and confidence.

"Even if I have been writing code with Java / C# for nearly a decade , nothing has come close to Typescript in terms of productivity,flexibility and confidence." Same here. Isn't this truly amazing? Take a jangly language like JS, and add some typing for the compiler, which forces you to write cleaner code in addition to all the compiler advantages ... combined with some really cool features and bang a magical, pragmatic language. Aside for some script things for which Python is still a blessing, I'd chose TS for everything else, at least to start. It just has the right mix of flexibility and expressivity etc.. Though TS is an MS project, I suggest it really is quite different, it's 'open from the start' kind of thing, you can have a loot at TSC internals. The team seems to be fairly dynamic and responsive. Typscript is my #1 favorite 'invention' of the last few years, I think it will be around for a while, and I hope to see many more JS API's 'properly documented' with the help of TS.

nerdponx 8y ago
I've heard it said that Javascript and C are both good languages to compile to -- the language itself is very "fast" in basic operations (V8 is hyper-optimized, C is relatively close to the metal), but an ugly language with lots of gotchas and warts that make it hard for a human to use effectively, but which don't pose a problem for a well-designed compiler.
- kccqzy 8y ago
  No lol. Javascript is not a good language to compile to. People compile to JavaScript only because it's the only language to run in browsers. Most compilers, after type checking and semantic analyses, basically generate a control flow graph with basic blocks. Javascript doesn't have goto so it doesn't allow you to express those low-level things natively, which is why emscripten has to include a relooper component to turn them back into loops and conditionals. If you want a good language to compile to, look at LLVM. It's a language designed to be compiled to, and it's mind-blowingly easy to compile to than either C or JavaScript.
- brett40324 8y ago
  It's maybe worth noting here that compiling to C and transpiling to JS are two entirely different paradigms of linking and building a software release.
untog 8y ago
The exception I'd add is that JavaScript's standard library is still very weak. I find myself leaning on Lodash for functionality that would be built into any other language. Part of me would love for TS to build one out and add shims as part of the transpilation process, but it would go miles out of the scope of what TS is trying to do. And I love that (compared to Babel) TS has no plugins and relatively few options.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  This is a very good point. I wish lodashy functions, and a few other things (Time?), were just integrated into JS, in a thoughtful way ... as part of the standard lib. So they could all be done in native code in the engine.
  - arusahni 8y ago
    This is a pain point that the community wishes to address: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-javascript-standard-library https://github.com/tc39/proposal-javascript-standard-library
    - austincheney 8y ago
      I don’t see this going very far for historical reasons. This idea has been suggested for over a decade, but back then the focus of inspiration was jQuery. The false argument was that everybody was requesting it into pages anyways so it should be part of the language. Not only was this idea proposed on top of a faulty assumption but there were also performance penalties and hidden conformance defects. These suggestions fall apart over time because they aren’t environment agnostic and lack objectivity. The subjectivity in question, “I want feature X”, usually doesn’t take alternate positions into consideration.
      - _ZeD_ 8y ago
        Truth be said, jQuery can be seen obsolete because most of the functionality has been moved inside the DOM or the ajax "standard library" ...
cellis 8y ago
Wow, almost...almost reminds me of a little known language called ActionScript 3. ;)
- johnfn 8y ago
  Whenever I feel in the mood to troll people, I tell them that TS is just a worse AS3. AS3 has types, classes... it even had XML literals! Eat that, JSX.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    To be more precise, TS is a worse ES4. AS was a partially conforming implementation of ES4 drafts that most are aware of. But Microsoft had its own thing along these lines - JScript.NET (in fact, it still ships as part of the .NET Framework, even though it's deprecated).
- jsight 8y ago
  As someone who hated ActionScript 3, I vehemently disagree. AS3 felt like some Java guys trying to force a Java mindset on a language that didn't really suit it. And I say that as a Java guy myself. TS is much more dynamic and less abrasive, IMO.
  - goliatone 8y ago
    Funny, I feel the same way about TS :) To be fair tho, you’re right. Flex was a very Java centric endeavor, from its compiler to the first big frameworks (Caignorm?) all the way to its target audience, which were enterprise companies that wanted to do their “thing” on the web. There was a massive developer migration from the Java/enterprise world to the AS3 ecosystem that had a visible impact. Also to be fair, if you look at Angular now with TS it feels even more Java’ish than ever. TS is great, is specially good for people coming from different languages in that it gives them a more familiar environment but the downside is that they have to make a lower effort to break away from old patterns and truly understand the new platform they’re working on.
    - 8y ago
johnfn 8y ago
> Take a jangly language like JS, and add some typing for the compiler, which forces you to write cleaner code in addition to all the compiler advantages ... combined with some really cool features and bang a magical, pragmatic language. Agreed. And when you compare how TS was designed to how other languages were designed, it makes a lot of sense why TS ended up being such a great language. Unlike virtually every other language in existence, TS was not designed from the ground up. It was designed with a very specific goal in mind: to adhere to the standards that JS developers had already converged on. So when a JS developer said if (foo), TS was built to realize that was an implicit type check against null. When a JS developer said if (obj.type === “bar”), TS read that as a way to ensure obj was in fact a bar. It’s unlikely that a language developer working from scratch would have come up with these odd idioms, let alone prioritized their inclusion into a new language. But in the case of TS, all these idioms came from millions of lines of working code. I think that’s why TS feels so enjoyable and easy to work with nowadays, whereas even the best of other languages feel a little clunky at times. It was developed prioritizing making real actual code idioms people wanted to do work.
- tomnipotent 8y ago
  > when you compare how TS was designed to how other languages were designed Is it safe to say that Microsoft has probably created/designed more programming languages than any other company? I can think of a dozen off the top of my head...
  - ygra 8y ago
    Anders Hejlsberg, the lead architect behind TypeScript has created C# and J++ at Microsoft, and Delphi and Turbo Pascal before. It's safe to say he has some experience in designing languages.
    - alasdair_ 8y ago
      J++ is one of the primary reasons I am so wary about using a Microsoft-invented language. "Embrace and extend" a well-used language with extra features (then make them only work well on Windows later) has always been a classic Microsoft strategy. If they could get away with it with Typescript, I'm sure they would try again.
weberc2 8y ago
> Aside for some script things for which Python is still a blessing, I'd chose TS for everything else, at least to start. I really wish Python had a decent type system; hopefully the Mypy project takes a leaf from TypeScript's book. Also, I've found that Go does for Python much of what TypeScript does for JavaScript. Of course, Go's APIs are different than Python's and its type system is less expressive than TypeScript so it's not a perfect analog, but Go also brings speed, parallelism, sane concurrency (Python's async is a hot mess by comparison), sane deployment, and great editor integrations, which are things I sorely miss when writing Python.
- goliatone 8y ago
  I think the biggest win of Go over Python is around the single binary distribution, which I guess you included with deployments. But it truly deserves a mention on its own and it’s a major point over other (most?) languages. It really makes up for a lot of the shortcomings of Go as a language IMO. But I enjoy Go best for building system tools, the single binary doesn’t shine as much once you involve containers at which point the friction between say a Python/Node container and a Go container is pretty much the same
  - rpeden 8y ago
    The tiny size of an Alpine + Go container is still nice compared to a typical Node or Python container, though.
    - weberc2 8y ago
      Try the Go/scratch combo (2.5MB): https://weberc2.bitbucket.io/posts/golang-docker-scratch-app.html https://weberc2.bitbucket.io/posts/golang-docker-scratch-app...
  - weberc2 8y ago
    That’s definitely up there. As for containers, I think Go’s static compilation story actually has some important ramifications for containers, namely I don’t need a set of base images for doing development since I can just toss a binary into the container and run it there (running in the container is useful because our local dev setup uses Docker Compose to orchestrate the microservices). If we could do this with Python it would simplify our CI and our development process by a good bit. And of course Go images are about a factor of magnitude smaller than Python images to boot!
tomnipotent 8y ago
> Though TS is an MS project, I suggest it really is quite different I'd be willing to say it's actually the "heart" of the new MS. Eliminating the incentive to selling OS licenses is doing marvels for them.
sime2009 8y ago
> Take a jangly language like JS, and add some typing for the compiler It so turns out that there is a great sweet spot in between the straight jacket typing of classic Java/C# and the loose "do way ever you like" approach in Python/JS. I don't want use another language that doesn't have optional typing and structural typing. It combines the best of both ends of the spectrum.
- Brometheus 8y ago
  My thinking exactly.
mcepl 8y ago
> Aside for some script things for which Python is still a blessing, … Have you tried using type hints (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0484/ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0484/) with mypy?

nerdponx 8y ago

I've heard it said that Javascript and C are both good languages to compile to -- the language itself is very "fast" in basic operations (V8 is hyper-optimized, C is relatively close to the metal), but an ugly language with lots of gotchas and warts that make it hard for a human to use effectively, but which don't pose a problem for a well-designed compiler.

kccqzy 8y ago
No lol. Javascript is not a good language to compile to. People compile to JavaScript only because it's the only language to run in browsers. Most compilers, after type checking and semantic analyses, basically generate a control flow graph with basic blocks. Javascript doesn't have goto so it doesn't allow you to express those low-level things natively, which is why emscripten has to include a relooper component to turn them back into loops and conditionals. If you want a good language to compile to, look at LLVM. It's a language designed to be compiled to, and it's mind-blowingly easy to compile to than either C or JavaScript.
brett40324 8y ago
It's maybe worth noting here that compiling to C and transpiling to JS are two entirely different paradigms of linking and building a software release.

untog 8y ago

The exception I'd add is that JavaScript's standard library is still very weak. I find myself leaning on Lodash for functionality that would be built into any other language. Part of me would love for TS to build one out and add shims as part of the transpilation process, but it would go miles out of the scope of what TS is trying to do. And I love that (compared to Babel) TS has no plugins and relatively few options.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
This is a very good point. I wish lodashy functions, and a few other things (Time?), were just integrated into JS, in a thoughtful way ... as part of the standard lib. So they could all be done in native code in the engine.
- arusahni 8y ago
  This is a pain point that the community wishes to address: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-javascript-standard-library https://github.com/tc39/proposal-javascript-standard-library
  - austincheney 8y ago
    I don’t see this going very far for historical reasons. This idea has been suggested for over a decade, but back then the focus of inspiration was jQuery. The false argument was that everybody was requesting it into pages anyways so it should be part of the language. Not only was this idea proposed on top of a faulty assumption but there were also performance penalties and hidden conformance defects. These suggestions fall apart over time because they aren’t environment agnostic and lack objectivity. The subjectivity in question, “I want feature X”, usually doesn’t take alternate positions into consideration.
    - _ZeD_ 8y ago
      Truth be said, jQuery can be seen obsolete because most of the functionality has been moved inside the DOM or the ajax "standard library" ...

cellis 8y ago

Wow, almost...almost reminds me of a little known language called ActionScript 3. ;)

johnfn 8y ago
Whenever I feel in the mood to troll people, I tell them that TS is just a worse AS3. AS3 has types, classes... it even had XML literals! Eat that, JSX.
- int_19h 8y ago
  To be more precise, TS is a worse ES4. AS was a partially conforming implementation of ES4 drafts that most are aware of. But Microsoft had its own thing along these lines - JScript.NET (in fact, it still ships as part of the .NET Framework, even though it's deprecated).
jsight 8y ago
As someone who hated ActionScript 3, I vehemently disagree. AS3 felt like some Java guys trying to force a Java mindset on a language that didn't really suit it. And I say that as a Java guy myself. TS is much more dynamic and less abrasive, IMO.
- goliatone 8y ago
  Funny, I feel the same way about TS :) To be fair tho, you’re right. Flex was a very Java centric endeavor, from its compiler to the first big frameworks (Caignorm?) all the way to its target audience, which were enterprise companies that wanted to do their “thing” on the web. There was a massive developer migration from the Java/enterprise world to the AS3 ecosystem that had a visible impact. Also to be fair, if you look at Angular now with TS it feels even more Java’ish than ever. TS is great, is specially good for people coming from different languages in that it gives them a more familiar environment but the downside is that they have to make a lower effort to break away from old patterns and truly understand the new platform they’re working on.
  - 8y ago

johnfn 8y ago

> Take a jangly language like JS, and add some typing for the compiler, which forces you to write cleaner code in addition to all the compiler advantages ... combined with some really cool features and bang a magical, pragmatic language. Agreed. And when you compare how TS was designed to how other languages were designed, it makes a lot of sense why TS ended up being such a great language. Unlike virtually every other language in existence, TS was not designed from the ground up. It was designed with a very specific goal in mind: to adhere to the standards that JS developers had already converged on. So when a JS developer said if (foo), TS was built to realize that was an implicit type check against null. When a JS developer said if (obj.type === “bar”), TS read that as a way to ensure obj was in fact a bar. It’s unlikely that a language developer working from scratch would have come up with these odd idioms, let alone prioritized their inclusion into a new language. But in the case of TS, all these idioms came from millions of lines of working code. I think that’s why TS feels so enjoyable and easy to work with nowadays, whereas even the best of other languages feel a little clunky at times. It was developed prioritizing making real actual code idioms people wanted to do work.

tomnipotent 8y ago
> when you compare how TS was designed to how other languages were designed Is it safe to say that Microsoft has probably created/designed more programming languages than any other company? I can think of a dozen off the top of my head...
- ygra 8y ago
  Anders Hejlsberg, the lead architect behind TypeScript has created C# and J++ at Microsoft, and Delphi and Turbo Pascal before. It's safe to say he has some experience in designing languages.
  - alasdair_ 8y ago
    J++ is one of the primary reasons I am so wary about using a Microsoft-invented language. "Embrace and extend" a well-used language with extra features (then make them only work well on Windows later) has always been a classic Microsoft strategy. If they could get away with it with Typescript, I'm sure they would try again.

weberc2 8y ago

> Aside for some script things for which Python is still a blessing, I'd chose TS for everything else, at least to start. I really wish Python had a decent type system; hopefully the Mypy project takes a leaf from TypeScript's book. Also, I've found that Go does for Python much of what TypeScript does for JavaScript. Of course, Go's APIs are different than Python's and its type system is less expressive than TypeScript so it's not a perfect analog, but Go also brings speed, parallelism, sane concurrency (Python's async is a hot mess by comparison), sane deployment, and great editor integrations, which are things I sorely miss when writing Python.

goliatone 8y ago
I think the biggest win of Go over Python is around the single binary distribution, which I guess you included with deployments. But it truly deserves a mention on its own and it’s a major point over other (most?) languages. It really makes up for a lot of the shortcomings of Go as a language IMO. But I enjoy Go best for building system tools, the single binary doesn’t shine as much once you involve containers at which point the friction between say a Python/Node container and a Go container is pretty much the same
- rpeden 8y ago
  The tiny size of an Alpine + Go container is still nice compared to a typical Node or Python container, though.
  - weberc2 8y ago
    Try the Go/scratch combo (2.5MB): https://weberc2.bitbucket.io/posts/golang-docker-scratch-app.html https://weberc2.bitbucket.io/posts/golang-docker-scratch-app...
- weberc2 8y ago
  That’s definitely up there. As for containers, I think Go’s static compilation story actually has some important ramifications for containers, namely I don’t need a set of base images for doing development since I can just toss a binary into the container and run it there (running in the container is useful because our local dev setup uses Docker Compose to orchestrate the microservices). If we could do this with Python it would simplify our CI and our development process by a good bit. And of course Go images are about a factor of magnitude smaller than Python images to boot!

tomnipotent 8y ago

> Though TS is an MS project, I suggest it really is quite different I'd be willing to say it's actually the "heart" of the new MS. Eliminating the incentive to selling OS licenses is doing marvels for them.

sime2009 8y ago

> Take a jangly language like JS, and add some typing for the compiler It so turns out that there is a great sweet spot in between the straight jacket typing of classic Java/C# and the loose "do way ever you like" approach in Python/JS. I don't want use another language that doesn't have optional typing and structural typing. It combines the best of both ends of the spectrum.

Brometheus 8y ago
My thinking exactly.

mcepl 8y ago

> Aside for some script things for which Python is still a blessing, … Have you tried using type hints (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0484/ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0484/) with mypy?