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Comment by tyri_kai_psomi | Hacker News Reader

Rust was created to solve's Mozilla's problems with C++

Go was created to solve Google's problems with C++ and engineering at scale

The fact that TypeScript wasn't created to solve a big issue internally at Microsoft is exactly what makes me skeptical of it and personally I view it as a trojan horse, just like VSCode. Sure, today it is done for benevolent reasons, maybe, but what about tomorrow? What if that trillion dollar market cap starts tanking? Then The benevolent VSCode and TypeScript ecosystems become levers to pull in the great big machine.

I would almost feel better if I knew it's stated explicit purpose upfront and what Microsoft's long term goals to monetize the ecosystem/platform were, because then I know what I am signing up for.

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Typescript was created to solve big issues internally at Microsoft, to deal with JS at scale. Microsoft has huge JS codebases, almost all of which are Typescript today. Office.com (including in-browser, online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint), Outlook.com, OneDrive.com, portal.azure.com, dev.azure.com, and so on. Microsoft may not be as recognizably a "web applications" company, but they do have a number of really big web applications, and they had real scaling problems with JS that Typescript was directly built to help with.

VSCode was started to see if they could build a good web application for development. Portions of it directly power a number of tools of Azure (on portal.azure.com), portions of it also directly powered the Dev Tools inside IE10+ and Edge "Classic". Bundling the web app into an Electron container after it had already paid for its own engineering efforts several times over as reusable sets of components for multiple large web apps Microsoft needed hardly seems like a "trojan horse" to me.

> The fact that TypeScript wasn't created to solve a big issue internally at Microsoft

AFAIK it was, the issue was the poor quality of Javascript development they were having and their inability to really get good tooling and static analysis. Then it kind of exploded as other people said "That's cool" and they then pushed it out as open source so that if they did need to let it go it wouldn't be totally dead in the water.

You speak with authority, but with ignorance. MS had a lot of JavaScript and needed to put some semblance to the madness of development. Read early history. Watch some talks of Hejlsberg, they are insightful and makes you a better developer.

TypeScript was created to solve issues with front end development at MS, its just that they were also genuinely interested about solving other people's problems.

Microsoft almost definitely has a 30-year-plan with TypeScript that is only slowly being revealed.

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