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Comment by halfmatthalfcat | Hacker News Reader

I mean, with all due respect, who are you to decide what Javascript is and is not? There's obviously a huge demand for type safety in Javascript, hence the existence and adoption of Typescript.

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I don't know but I've been using JavaScript for a while now. It seems like a lot of the people that want JavaScript to look similar to other languages are coming from different programming fields, and want JavaScript to look more like their language of choice.

Most of the changes to JS in the last 20 years, have been serious improvements, but they did not change the fundamental characteristics of the language.

Believe it or not there are a lot of people that like JavaScript!

> but I've been using JavaScript for close to 20 years now

How dare you use JavaScript for anything else than validating forms!!! What is that jQuery thing??? Stop trying to make JavaScript into something it's not!!!

What about the aspect of JavaScript having weak type system relegates it's use to only be used for forms?

Is C only used for forms?

I thought you were there literally 20 years ago when people were complaining about adding DHTML to the browser.

And most of the developments in Java, since 1.8, have been taking ideas from other languages (primarily Scala) to make the language better. Why is it ok for other languages to evolve but not Javascript?

Scala is a perfect example of an overly complex bloated mess with so many foot-guns I can't even begin to count them.

EDIT: I never said JS shouldn't evolve! JavaScript has evolved a ton! From better handling of asynchronous control-flow with promises and then async/await, to destructing, spreads, constant assignments, Map/Set objects, a number of other improvements I can't even begin to list. But none of these changes fundamentally changed JavaScript from being a dynamic weakly typed language.

I actually write a lot of Scala and beg to differ. The chances for bad developers to write bad code in Scala are higher than most other languages but what you might call foot-guns are actually elegant ways at solving complex problems.

A lot of these "problems" (implicits, enums, etc) were solved with Scala 3 too. Another example of a language evolving and becoming better based on community feedback and thoughtful iteration.

I'm on the fence about this one. On the one hand I would love strong typing in JS.

But the reason I never adopted TS is because one time I spent months converting Coffeescript back into JS once it fell out of favor. This was back when a bunch of Ruby developers decided that JS should look like Ruby.

If I'm writing Javascript, I'm writing Javascript, not something that pretends to be something else.

The good news is that you can take your time with it, only start using typescript in new files while converting older ones slowly. And even if you never do that, typescript tooling provides hints and autocompletion to vanilla J's files as well.

You can generally migrate out of TS very easily if it was the wrong choice. You can mostly use the compiler output as a drop-in replacement for your source code. Depending on compiler options, it's quite readable.

You can convert TS to JS at the drop of a hat. This is part of what’s required to get it to run a browser, which doesn’t understand native TS. It’s different to Coffeescript which was different syntax for JS. TS is additional, type-specific syntax but you are still writing JS.

I ran a team that had to maintain a large Coffee codebase, that we could never get the resources to move off. So I know that pain. TS is different, both in how it works and the level of adoption. Coffeescript was always niche, and some benefits were there but they weren’t game-changing for (eg) writing correct code or maintaining large codebases.

One of the benefits of TypeScript is that it literally is just JavaScript plus some. You can literally run `tsc` and it will spit out JavaScript written the same way as you wrote it but without any of the types. The only things that might look out of place is things like enums or decorators but you can choose not to use them.

> but they did not change the fundamental characteristics of the language.

FWIW, this proposal does not change the fundamental characteristics of javascript. It just adds a new comment syntax.

There is no way this is where the buck stops... after comment syntax people will look at compiler optimizations. It will change the language.

I would like to say that I have written js for a long time as well and I love it; but the thing that keeps me around nowadays is typescript. I would need to be paid much more to work on a non-ts js codebase nowadays.

But didn't he merely express his opinion about this?

I'm questioning their opinion, as we do on this site.

You asked: "who are you to decide?". That's not questioning their opinion but rather their right to voice their opinion.

Compare the lines of code (on Github, say) written in straight Javascript and the lines of code written in Typescript.

I do not think the demand is quite as huge as you think it is.

I'm not sure that's a useful metric.

This is like saying compare the lines using generators or proxies vs the lines using type annotations.

Just because a feature is not widely adopted it doesn't mean that is not useful to the people using it, especially when the feature is used to mitigate the entire "cannot find property of undefined" type of errors.

In the linked article, the author spends 1 sentence dealing with objections:

> I can understand if JavaScript developers are afraid of TypeScript taking over their language. However, this proposal will be as far as things will go w.r.t. adding TypeScript features to JavaScript

And in the next few sections it includes someone who wants to build on the proposal including using type hints to optimize code. I just think there's literally no way to guarantee that "this will be as far as things will go". Yes languages evolve and add new things all the time. But GP's point is that the language seems to be going toward what people want it to be coming from other languages.

I agree, stop trying to make JS something it's not.

> And in the next few sections it includes someone who wants to build on the proposal including using type hints to optimize code.

This changes literally nothing about the JS language. JS engines already attempt to determine the types of things to optimize the code they generate. Type annotations would just allow them to make more aggressive optimizations.

> This changes literally nothing about the JS language.

Besides adding a bunch of new syntax, of which JS already has far too much.

> Just because a feature is not widely adopted it doesn't mean that is not useful to the people using it

But it does mean there likely isn't a "huge demand", which was the original claim.

You're attempting to move the goalposts here.

Every TypeScript project is going to have at least an equivalent amount of JavaScript code sitting in the repo from the output of the TypeScript compiler.

most people don't version control the output of their compiled build though.

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