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Comment by gmac | Hacker News Reader

As something of a side note on this post, suggesting there is a single 'Dart/CoffeeScript route' that languages can take seems a bit misleading.

Dart is a whole different language that happens to be transpilable to JS. CoffeeScript is just a dash of syntactic sugar that (IMHO) makes JS a whole lot less tedious to write ('The golden rule of CoffeeScript is: "It's just JavaScript"').

Notwithstanding that, I am keen to try using TypeScript on a new project one of these days.

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Good point! I used similar categorising as Anders Hejlberg used in the JavaScript Jabber podcast (https://devchat.tv/js-jabber/209-jsj-typescript-with-anders-...). For those who don't like audio, he basically referred TypeScript being superset of JavaScript, unlike some other languages.

Somehow I can't stand listening to Hejlberg.

Often it feels like the CS professors I met at university, who wanted to teach you about "real programming languages and not such toys like JavaScript"

I can't go with that. Anders H is one of the most avuncular, helpful and accessible voices out there. Oh and his very verbs twinkle!

Well, I just saw a talk about TypeScript 2 and it felt to me that he was belittling JavaScript.

JS is very cool because of how readily available it is and the awesome ecosystem that has grown around it. That said - you don't have to be a CS professor to see that the language (especially in early incarnations) wasn't well designed, to put it nicely. A.H. knows this just like anyone with the skills to design languages and compilers.

If you've ever worked with a strongly typed language you can't but belittle JavaScript ;)

I worked with C++, Java and Scala, and all felt really unwieldy.

You may be traumatised if you ever hear Crockford talk about JavaScript!

Haha, I met him on a JS conf once. There was one of those old "JavaScript has no types and is no real language" guys and he kicked his ass.

Basically he said static typing could be good and there were languages like Scala out there with real good type systems, but most of the "pro static types"-fanboys are using crap like Java or C++.

You're not your programming language. When people are expressing distaste about a language, it's (usually) not an attack towards its users.

Yes, but talking about "toy languages" when literally millions of people on the world make a living out of this is just mean :(

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