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by innocentoldguy 3416 days ago
I can see your point about transpilers. Of all the transpilers I've used, I like Elm the best, due to its functional nature, syntax, strong typing, compiler, and debugger. It isn't fully stable yet, as a language, and there have been breaking changes in each release since I started using it, but it offers the most promising departure from JavaScript. I guess anything that facilitates the de-turding of web development in general is a good thing.
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throwawaydbfif 3416 days ago
Haha de-turding is a great way to put it. I just don't think a new language is a reasonable option. There's what maybe... 50,000 different versions of the ~500 web browsers from different eras still running out there somewhere?

If having code work almost everywhere is important for a project, that project will be using vanilla ES3-5 JavaScript for the next 10+ years. Maybe not the latest startups but all sorts of enterprisey ancient stuff that needs to run needs some path forward. If typescript can provide that it will become the lowest common denominator at any company that ships both new and legacy codebases.

Typescript to JS transpilation is extremely similar to the strategy that produced C++ from C. We know it will work, and it's been done before to great success. C++ isn't perfect but I think everyone agrees it's definitely a lot nicer to work with than C, and that's exactly how I describe Typescript as well

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innocentoldguy 3416 days ago
I do see your point about C++. I was programming when it first came out, back in 1985. However, I've always thought C++ felt "Band-aid-y." It never felt elegant and cohesive to me, the way Objective C does. C++ is like a chainsaw-hang-glider-shotgun-bat; badass, to say the least, but still a clumpy work of bailing wire and duct tape. Typescript feels the same way, only not quite so badass. It's more like the Robin to C++'s Batman.

Having said that, my only exposure to Typescript has been in Angular 2. Having used other tools like Ember, React, and Elm, Angular 2 seems like a magic step backwards to me. I will concede that my opinions on Typescript may be tinted by my experience with Angular 2 though, so I'll give Typescript a stand-alone, honest evaluation, and adjust my opinions as necessary.

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