[weinzierl]

The article assumes that the reader is familiar with what is meant by the “Dart plan” and the “TypeScript plan”. I only have cursory knowledge of Typescript and know nothing about Dart.

Others in this thread already went into more details about this, but it doesn't help me much as long as I don't have an idea what the basic difference between both approaches is.

Can someone ELI5 the gist of both approaches?

[magnio]

Dart was made by Google as a new language for the web. In the beginning, it was already quite different from JavaScript at the time, and crucially the main way to use it is through the Dart VM (that was embedded into a build of Chromium). It did have compilation to JS, but AFAIK never caught on. In the end, Dart diverges from JS so much so that the split in ecosystem means it's not viable for the web anymore.

TypeScript, on the other hand, has always set its goal to be a superset of JS and to transpile to JS only. This means a more familiar syntax, as well as (practical, IMO) design choices that ensure higher compatibility with the existing JS ecosystem. There is no TypeScript without JavaScript. Its development coincided with that of VSCode, and arguably is one the main facilitators for the latter's feasibility.

I have to say Microsoft's grand plan of VSCode and TypeScript has to be one of the most astonishing software revolution in this decade. The foresight and acuity of Erich Gamma and Anders Hejlsberg is just amazing.

[damagednoob]

I can't think of anyone besides Anders Hejlsberg that has a better track record with programming language innovation. At least 3 different languages that have all been commercially successful.

[tialaramex]

It's tricky to compare. Anders is involved in a bunch of important stuff, but it's not as though it's all successes either. He's certainly important, but I don't know how to compare "track records" on "innovation" because that's so vague.

One of his projects at Microsoft was J++ which is basically own-brand Java. Doubtless that's great material for learning to design C# but nobody is going to claim J++ was a success.

[pjmlp]

Only because Sun's lawsuit, several C# features were already present in J++ as the extensions that caused the lawsuit in first place.

VM integration with host OS, J/Direct (P/Invoke), events, COM integration, WFC (Windows Forms).

[otteromkram]

Dennis Richie[0] and/or Ken Thompson[1] might be of interest.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson

[joshkel]

In addition to the other comments -

TypeScript deliberately takes a "good enough" approach to improving JavaScript, instead of designing an ideal but incompatible approach. For example, its handling of function parameter bivariance (https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/type-compatibil...) is unsound but works much better with the existing JavaScript ecosystem. By contrast, a more academic functional programming language would guarantee a sound type system but would be a huge shift from JavaScript.

By analogy, Herb Sutter is arguing that something like the C++ Core Guidelines (https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines), with tooling help in this new Cpp2 syntax, can bring real improvements to safety. Something like Rust's borrow checker would bring much stricter guarantees, backed by academic research and careful design, but would be incompatible and a huge adjustment.

[Jtsummers]

Someone already wrote up a comment on that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38141390