[johnfn]

> Take a jangly language like JS, and add some typing for the compiler, which forces you to write cleaner code in addition to all the compiler advantages ... combined with some really cool features and bang a magical, pragmatic language.

Agreed. And when you compare how TS was designed to how other languages were designed, it makes a lot of sense why TS ended up being such a great language.

Unlike virtually every other language in existence, TS was not designed from the ground up. It was designed with a very specific goal in mind: to adhere to the standards that JS developers had already converged on. So when a JS developer said if (foo), TS was built to realize that was an implicit type check against null. When a JS developer said if (obj.type === “bar”), TS read that as a way to ensure obj was in fact a bar.

It’s unlikely that a language developer working from scratch would have come up with these odd idioms, let alone prioritized their inclusion into a new language. But in the case of TS, all these idioms came from millions of lines of working code.

I think that’s why TS feels so enjoyable and easy to work with nowadays, whereas even the best of other languages feel a little clunky at times. It was developed prioritizing making real actual code idioms people wanted to do work.

[tomnipotent]

> when you compare how TS was designed to how other languages were designed

Is it safe to say that Microsoft has probably created/designed more programming languages than any other company? I can think of a dozen off the top of my head...

[ygra]

Anders Hejlsberg, the lead architect behind TypeScript has created C# and J++ at Microsoft, and Delphi and Turbo Pascal before. It's safe to say he has some experience in designing languages.

[alasdair_]

J++ is one of the primary reasons I am so wary about using a Microsoft-invented language. "Embrace and extend" a well-used language with extra features (then make them only work well on Windows later) has always been a classic Microsoft strategy. If they could get away with it with Typescript, I'm sure they would try again.

[abhayb]

Thank you! This is the argument that made me give TypeScript a try. I work in Kotlin day to day which tries to fix its base language (and batteries included with it) while not fixing it too much. TS sounded like a language in that vein.