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Comment by krzyk | Hacker News Reader

Typescript?

Why replace a nice language like python with anything coming out of javascript?

Its type system is miles better than Python and it has some basic stuff Python doesn't have like block scope. Functional programming is also intentionally kind of a pain in Python with the limited lambdas.

If TypeScript had the awesome python stdlib and the Numpy/ML ecosystem I would use it over Python in a heartbeat.

you can define a named closure in python, i do it from time to time, though it does seem to surprise others sometimes. i think maybe it's not too common.

I know, it's just very unergonomic.

Typescript also has significantly better performance. This is largely thanks to the browser wars funnelling an insane amount of engineering effort toward JavaScript engines over the last couple decades. Nodejs runs v8, which is the JavaScript engine used by chrome. And Bun uses JSC, written for safari.

For IO bound tasks, it also helps that JavaScript has a much simpler threading model. And it ships an event based IO system out of the box.

Typescript is a really nice language even though it sits on a janky runtime. I’d love a subset of typescript that compiles to Go or something like that.

Isn't that what Project Corsa is supposed to solve?

Project Corsa is a rewrite of the TypeScript compiler in Go. I don't think that's what's being asked for.

Typescript is ubiquitous in web, and there are some amazing new frameworks that reuse typescript types on the server and client (trpc, tanstack). It's faster (than python), has ergonomic types, and a massive community + npm ecosystem. Bun advances the state of the art for runtime performance (which anthropic just bought and use for Claude code).

Did you just write both:

> The only reason to use it is inertia

and

> Typescript is ubiquitous in web

:-)

Those are both valid reasons to use both languages. The "only" (whether true or not) is what the argument hinges on. It is roughly the same as saying that the only advantage of X is that it is popular, but Y is also popular and has additional advantages, therefore, Y is better than X. That is a valid argument, whether the premises are true or not.

I do not disagree but if you are going to say that "X" is only used because of "Y", maybe if you are pitching "Z" instead of "X" do not start with the "Y" :)

Agree to disagree. He's setting up the argument that Z is strictly better than X.

But it comes from Javascript and inherits its issues, and is used mostly because there is no other option on the web and that makes it popular, not its quality, but lack of options. So a closed ecosystem with just one language - Javascript, and any other languages that can be compiled to it. And Typescript is a bandaid to make sensible type system on top of Javascript, and it still leaves option open to use Javascript lack of rules. Concurrency in JS also looks junky.

And on readability Python also wins (if we prohibit stupidities like PEP 572)

TypeScript is great!

Has shortcomings like all languages but it brought a lot of advanced programming language concepts to the masses!

Typescript is a lot nicer than Python in many ways. Especially via Deno, and especially for scripting (imports work like people want!).

There are some things that aren't as good, e.g. Python's arbitrary precision integers are definitely nicer for scripting. And I'd say Python's list comprehension syntax is often quite nice even if it is weirdly irregular.

But overall Deno is a much better choice for ad-hoc scripting than Python.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

I am aware, but Python has that by default. In Javascript it's opt-in and less ergonomic. E.g. try loading a 64-bit integer from JSON.

I agree, but bigints are missing from json because the json spec defines all numbers as 64 bit floats. Any other kind of number in JSON is nonstandard.

JavaScript itself supports bigint literals just fine. Just put an ‘n’ after your number literal. Eg 0xffffffffffffffn.

There’s a whole bunch of features I wish we could go in and add to json. Like comments, binary blobs, dates and integers / bigints. It would be so much nicer to work with if it has that stuff.

> the json spec defines all numbers as 64 bit floats

It absolutely doesn't. It doesn't impose any limits on number precision or magnitude.

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