The typescript playground[1], which lets you try TypeScript in your browser, looks so professional and finished when compared to CoffeeScript[2] or Dart[3]. As someone who attempted a half-baked Rust to JavaScript transpiler[4], I am floored with the packaging of TypeScript (tutorials, specs, editor integrations, npm, playground). At the moment, the only missing feature that my jealousy could point out is autoscrolling (see lexer example in my demo)!<p>By the way, is playground using v1.0?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.typescriptlang.org/Playground/" rel="nofollow">http://www.typescriptlang.org/Playground/</a><p>[2] <a href="http://coffeescript.org/" rel="nofollow">http://coffeescript.org/</a> (Try CoffeeScript tab)<p>[3] <a href="http://try.dartlang.org/" rel="nofollow">http://try.dartlang.org/</a><p>[4] <a href="http://bilalhusain.com/rust-lexer/syntax.html" rel="nofollow">http://bilalhusain.com/rust-lexer/syntax.html</a>
I am huge believer in typescript. This has made me consider html5 seriously for the first time.<p>There are still many dark spots (hello js scope, bs standards), but with Typescript I've already built stuff I could have only done AIR in the past.<p>I find it ironic that MSFT tried to compete with Flash with Silverlight (and failed I think), and to me, Typescript means end of the line for Flash/AS3.<p>The language is dead easy to pick up, and IntelliJ has been a really good IDE with it.<p>Highly recommended.
We've been using TypeScript for 9 months now on a large project. It's fantastic. There's now way I'll go back to pure JavaScript again.<p>The type system just catches so many defects, and they're of the kind that are hard and boring to find (typos).<p>Plus IntelliSense integration (including jsdoc) is great.<p>On the downside, our project takes some time to compile so we had to build a tool to do it incrementally. Plus it doesn't play well with one-class-per-file structures (but I expect that to be fixed).
Most significant announcement IMHO:<p>> <i>Today, we're announcing that we will begin taking pull requests for the TypeScript compiler and language service.</i><p>A relatively-flagshippy MS project becomes truly open source. This is awesome!
Having spent quite a bit of my dev life with typed languages and now coding a LOT in pure JavaScript, I'm actually not at all thrilled by TypeScript. Yes, pure JS is bit hard to maintain and it does occasionally pisses me off but at the same time it is liberating.<p>Not having to constantly keep adding types all over, not having to constantly refactor things because I now accept object instead of an int etc is refreshing. And best of all, not having <i>compile</i> at all is fast and simple. I'm only using JS frameworks that doesn't force me do build before testing the page and retains purity of JavaScript (that means no simulations of traditional OOP). Yes, sometime I do make bad mistakes and spend some time chasing down bugs that would have been caught in typed languages. However overall I find cost of adding types all over and maintaining them over the evolution of code is actually higher. It would have been really great if they had produced cool algorithms that could have inferred types as much as possible and added it as static analysis tool instead of JS extension.<p>Just because JS doesn't have type checking I'm now set in to mindset of doing quick tests of small changes, write more elaborate tests and so on. Even in moderately large project I think pure JavaScript is not only <i>maintainable</i> but also joy to work with compared to typed languages.
Anders is my favourite language designer, ever :)<p>TypeScript is something I'm still trying to get more buy-in from my team, but the issue is the lack of decent autocomplete/static analysis in anything other than Visual Studio. I'm working on that problem myself, actually.
It'd be great if there was a compiler that would compile TypeScript to asm.js [0]. Adding type-safety in TypeScript is only for the programmer -- when you compile it to Javascript, you don't get any performance increase. But, if you could compile it to asm.js, you'd actually get some performance increase out of it. (Note: I don't know much about TypeScript or asm.js, so if what I just said is completely untrue, I'd love to know why.)<p>[0]: <a href="http://asmjs.org/" rel="nofollow">http://asmjs.org/</a>
Could someone be so kind as to explain why I should consider Typescript over Coffeescript in future projects?<p>I've been using CS for the past year or two, but I'm hearing a lot of buzz around TS for the past few months. It would be really nice to have a better idea as to why it should be best to move now - is it really that much better?<p>(I love the CS tools available on PyCharm; they really made my life easier. That said, I think that there are similar TS tools available as well)
Am I really missing it or are they announcing a new version with no release notes?<p>edit: it seems that they had them in the blog post for the release candidate <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/typescript/archive/2014/02/25/announcing-typescript-1-0rc.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.msdn.com/b/typescript/archive/2014/02/25/announ...</a>
Anders is a really good language designer. Everything this dude touches turns to gold. He was also behind C# and as far as enterprise languages go C# is a joy to work with. TypeScript is the same way. It's all really well thought out and instead of getting in the way the type system actually helps because you can leverage the dynamic aspects of JavaScript during the prototyping phase and then gradually add types as the design is fleshed out. Typed Racket I think is the other language that gives you similar capabilities but I haven't played enough with that one to have an opinion yet.
The language is nice, but the compiler uses its own lib.d.ts which has all sorts of definitions for browsers and even proprietary MSIE ones. This doesn't make any sense when using TypeScript in any other context (like Gjs, NodeJS, Rhino, Seed, etc.). TypeScript shouldn't assume a browser by default, or at least provide an option for compiling without lib.d.ts.
This project really is the greatest thing that could happen in computer science : a great mind trying to solve a problem in the most pragmatic yet elegant way to achieve the greatest possible benefit for developper with th minimal amount of time and work.
edit: The talk has ended now. Will update if I find a link to that talk.<p>Anders talking about TypeScript live: <a href="http://channel9.msdn.com/" rel="nofollow">http://channel9.msdn.com/</a>
I always get voted down for this, but I still feel that typescript is an answer to a question that nobody is asking. (I'm also very suspect of all of the positive comments. Is HN really this pro-MS for JavaScript?) In my company, we literally have a typescript counterpart team doing the same projects. Our code is cleaner, better architected, and our team is able to consistently produce 2 to 3 times more features. In my experience, the teams that choose typescript are usually windows devs that cannot wean themselves off of visual studio due to their dependence upon auto completion and IDE tools. I'm not hating, I just don't understand why any js dev would add code to their code.