Microsoft Previews New JavaScript-Like Programming Language TypeScript | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Previews New JavaScript-Like Programming Language TypeScript

techcrunch.com

70 pointspbreit22 comments

I have this strange sort of sinking feeling that HTML5 is going to hit the open Internet in much the same way IE6 did. Every player in the game seems to be working in a different direction and the browser is turning into something much more than a vehicle for content.

I know I'm not the only one who believes this is a bad thing.

Right now that can't happen. Market share is dictating a productive environment for HTML5 that forces standard compliant behaviour. Until a browser comes out on top it's unlikely we'll see anything similar to what IE6 did to the web for sometime.

Except in mobile, where webkit is the only game in town. In fact, I think we're already seeing web developers write mobile sites that only work in webkit.

Except Google adding whatever they feel like to Chrome and feature hungry devs pushing users to Chrome because MSIE lacks "HTML5 support", when what they mean is that they want to use last week's experimental APIs in production sites today.

And only writing for webkit when doing mobile. Screw Firefox, or Opera or webstandards in general. Weehoo iPhone! (May also not break on Android)

It's already a strong trend. I say the fear is justified.

The website itself has a lot more information:

http://www.typescriptlang.org/

At a glance, this looks like a rather elegant solution to the problem of adding optional type-markers to JS without completely destroying the nature of the language (as AS3 did, IMO).

I find it interesting. Minimal addition, which adds a bit of strong typing to JS.

Weak typing is the thing that annoys me the most in JS, coming from Python.

Sublime text, Vi and Emacs syntax files for TypeScript too http://blogs.msdn.com/b/interoperability/archive/2012/10/01/...

Added it to this long list of languages that compile to JavaScript: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...

TypeScript is very similar in spirit to Dart, by Google. (see the 'Static typing' section of the above webpage)

See also: http://altjs.org/

There are mailing list and IRC channels linked from that page for those who are interested in this stuff.

As I posted in the other thread of this story:

What about debug support? I wont be using anything like Coffeescript or TypeScript until they get their Code Mapping down for debugging. Until then its nothing more than a cute novelty.

People claiming that its "not that hard to track down issues" without proper code mapping, just aren't working on a large enough codebase.

here is the blog link from MSDN http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2012/10/01/typescr...

I really like the Modules feature, it allows you to quickly namespace your classes.

Larger discussion on HN over here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4597716

Embrace, extend and extinguish?[1]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

Uhhh.. I hope Microsoft understands that JavaScript isn't popular because of language features or syntax, it's popular because of widespread browser support.

This compiles to javascript ... whats the problem?

The problem is that the main benefit is a misdirection (syntax similar to javascript), on top of that this doesn't add anything different than coffee script or Dart already does.

This is a language without a proposal just to keep microsoft in the game.

Since Google and Mozilla have a javascript alternative we need one too

Mozilla has a JS alternative? I wish that http://www.rust-lang.org compiled to JS but it doesn't.

This is very different than my understanding of coffee script and dart in that it is a superset of JS. This means you can incrementally make use of and learn it.

MS came with a different approach. Rather than recreating the language of the web they asked how they van make it better.

I'm pretty sure Anders Hejlsberg isn't a shill for corporate strategists.

Oh, please.

So because of Dart -- which isn't exactly storming the internet and converting developers -- this is some lame Microsoft me-too attempt?

Look at the ecosystem! How many JS Frameworks? Variety is good.

From the TypeScript homepage:

"Any browser. Any host. Any OS. Open Source. "

This doesn't seem too different from CoffeeScript.

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