[bourneavent]

>He might be right on some fronts,

JS was designed in a week. He's completely right, it's just poorly designed. Javascript will always be around because of technical debt and habit. But that doesn't change the fact that Douglas is right.

Also nobody really uses javascript anymore. It's completely insane. We compile Typescript into javascript then run javascript. That should tell you something about javascript.

[hajile]

TS is literally JS with a few unsound type hints. If you're writing TS, you are already writing JS.

[incrudible]

> a few unsound type hints

Which turns out to be exactly what you need to be productive writing software. People who obsess about type systems and try to solve everything within them create a whole new bag of problems.

[hajile]

StandardML is a counter-example. It has sound types but keeps them utilitarian and simple enough so people can’t easily overdo the typing. I’ve become very sick of the “type palaces” people construct (they remind me of “enterprise java” where people do stupidly complex stuff because they can).

[bourneavent]

I mean I could say C++ is just python with memory management macros.

We're getting into the domain of opinion here. I would say TS is different enough such that it's two different languages.

Programming with type checking and programming with plain JS is really different. A programmer without experience in types (ie plain JS) won't be able to pick up types that that quickly on average. Things like enums, Generics, sum types, product types, recursive types, really change the game by restricting what functions can do.

[hajile]

Typescript's devs define it as simply JS with types to the point that they even have a proposal to add those type constructs into JS at which point the syntactic difference would be very small indeed.

> Things like enums, Generics, sum types, product types, recursive types, really change the game by restricting what functions can do.

If only that were true. The reality is that if you can write it in JS, you can add TS types no matter how horrible or anti-pattern the code happens to be. The constructs you mention don't restrict what functions can do in any way at all.

> A programmer without experience in types (ie plain JS) won't be able to pick up types that that quickly on average.

The average JS dev seems to have a Java/C# background where types exist. Further, they seem bent on slowly transforming JS into one of those languages.