Hacker News Reader

Afaik, it's still missing a high quality REPL which python can give you. Extremely useful for exploratory coding.

Otherwise I have to agree, Typescript is a pretty damned good compromise.

Deno’s REPL is quite nice. It’s syntax highlighted, supports Typescript and autocompletion as well as creature comforts like enter opening a new line when the cursor is in between quotations. You can also pass a file to load and then work interactively from that. The URL-based imports allow you to paste code from another project and not worry about `npm install`ing anything.

You can get pretty close with Vitest, a unit test as a REPL, and Vitest's ability to run tests as soon as the file changes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com