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Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

I realize that I made a factual error in my post and I thank you for pointing that out, but to me your post reads as very condescending, to the point of being rude. It reminds me very clearly why I don't often post comments here.

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That seems like a really weird thing to read into k_bx's post. I think you might want to try re-calibrating your "is this post meant personally"-meter :).

FWIW, I didn't see any condescension there. I got more of a "Oh, you ain't seen nothin' yet!" vibe from it. Obviously, YMMV.

EDIT: Words

It sounded a bit condescending to me. Besides that it was an empty comment; a claim with zero citations - not very useful at all.

Anyway, I'm sure that I don't care if an unknown language pioneered something. The language that makes good features popular is the better one.

> a claim with zero citations - not very useful at all.

Gradual typing isn't exactly a TypeScript invention: Typed Racket is gradually typed, has unions and intersections (which in turn date from further back than TR), refinement types, occurrence types, and even comes with a guarantee that typed code won't violate contracts. If the Racket runtime detects a contract violation, blame will always be assigned to untyped code. TR does more than TS does, and it was designed and implemented earlier.

> It sounded a bit condescending to me.

I didn't read k_bx's comment as belittlement of TypeScript: anything that makes JavaScript better is obviously a good thing! (Since we can't get rid of it.) But, as a matter of fact, TypeScript isn't pushing “what types can do”.

I'm not a native English speaker and didn't try to be rude, I'm sorry if you felt like that. I don't encourage you to post comments here more often though, posting more often doesn't necessary means it's good for you and everyone else.

Thanks, I appreciate it.

If you want to find the reason to be upset, you will.

And it adds nothing to the conversation, and has spawned an entire subthread of comments like ours which also adds nothing to the conversations. Its exactly the type of comment that should be banned from HN.

It's not just a factual error, its kind of a sore spot to many people.

TypeScript is a pretty bad type system, but compared to Java and other mainstream ones, it looks like it "pushes the envelop".

Because of this, we're stuck with an half baked, crappy type system designed for mass consumption, and people adopt it with a round of applause.

That's no excuse to me an ass in response to your post...but it's part of why you'll see answers like that.

It's the classic "not invented here" syndrome, but on the level of languages. It's not enough to be able to have strong types in Javascript, they want people to stop writing Javascript, scrap the entire ecosystem, create all new browsers on every platform, and only write in their strongly typed language that's just as flawed as Javascript.

He simply wrote that TS isn't on the edge, without getting personal.

I astouned what some people read into a perfectly reasonable critique...

What about PureScript, it's way beyond TypeScript and still compiles and interacts with JavaScript.

What I find very funny about PureScript is how it has these super-fancy types, designed from the ground up to express things like semigroupoids, lenses and profunctor-based optics... yet it doesn't have a numeric type better than JavaScript's good old floating points.

Just to be clear, this isn't meant as criticism, since I absolutely love how Haskell (and now PureScript too!) exploit algebraic structures to make code more reusable and robust. But the contrast between “can express fancy structures precisely” and “doesn't have precise arithmetic” is very amusing.

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