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Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Monaco 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.

Why 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.

Right. 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).

Do you remember CoffeeScript?

I 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.

Microsoft 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.

"was"? What happened to Coffeescript, is it dead now?

I don't mean to imply it's dead, but I think it's safe to say it's resting? I haven't heard of new development being done in it in a while, and its time in the spotlight certainly seems to be over.

Well, no, but it has developed a taste for brains.

"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.

Personally (!) 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?

I 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.

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