[Vekz]

Its true and unfortunate. Typescript is the new Coffeescript. It splits the ecosystem. Flow is a progressive enhancement and improves the ecosystem. Typescript has had more push in the mindshare marketing from Microsoft.

[wereHamster]

TypeScript doesn't split the community any more than Flow does. TypeScript remains very close to ES2016/2017, syntax-wise, with the only major difference being type annotations, but you have those with flow as well. Anybody who can read JavaScript can read TypeScript.

[thejameskyle]

Flow tries to integrate with the existing ecosystem as much as possible. By taking advantage of Babel, ESLint, Atom, etc.

With Flow you don't even have to opt-in to a new syntax. You can just use comments:

    function foo(val /* : boolean */) /* : string */ {}

Using really powerful inference you can also write much fewer types. If you have well types libraries [you sometimes don't need types in your code at all](https://medium.com/@thejameskyle/flow-mapping-an-object-373d...).

[josteink]

> With Flow you don't even have to opt-in to a new syntax. You can just use comments:

So you use a opt-in comment-based syntax instead of a opt-in non-comment based one for type-annotations.

Hardly a big difference.

> Using really powerful inference you can also write much fewer types

I'm just going to assume you didn't know typescript does this too.

Typescript is nice. You should give it a try once. You may end up surprised:)

[_uhtu]

Comments don't change it from being valid javascript whatsoever.

[djmashko2]

> By taking advantage of Babel, ESLint, Atom, etc.

Doesn't TypeScript actually predate all of those tools? So that logic doesn't seem reasonable.