Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by smrtinsert 4158 days ago
In my opinion Javascript is on its path to marginalization. Just glancing the recent tooling options for ClojureScript and TypeScript, I'm pretty sure now is the time to start putting your alt-js experience ahead of Javascript on the resume. The syntactical checks are great (typescript ides) or instant feedback (clojurescript figwheel) but for me the killer is the performance optimization over 'raw' Javascript due to compilation optimizations.

Better tooling, better performance, why would I want to go back?

The language of the future includes a Javascript compilation target.
2 comments
untog 4158 days ago
Before you start talking about what to put on your resume, I'd look at what job descriptions are asking for. I haven't seen many asking for ClojureScript or TypeScript yet.

TypeScript (and to a lesser extent CoffeeScript) seem fine to me, but ClojureScript looks very different to JS. I'd always advise someone to learn JS first, then your compiled language of choice.

link
smrtinsert 4157 days ago
Which is why I said marginalization. Knowing Javascript is important, but I believe a savvy team will jump on one these languages to turbo charge their productivity.
link
colin_jack 4157 days ago
Possibly, but you can argue the opposite. I've seen a bit of commercial TypeScript and it's been horrific and to me just matched the anything but Web/JS approach I was expecting.

I'd also worry that the TS community itself would risk marginalization, end up as a small niche ghetto, with most of the interesting stuff going on in ES7+.

Hard to be sure but I wouldn't write off JS just yet, people have been doing it for years as new/better (flash/silverlight/compile to JS) technologies have promised to make it seem soooo 90s.

link
htilford 4158 days ago
The typing notation of TypeScript is on it's way to becoming part of Javascript. See http://www.2ality.com/2014/10/typed-javascript.html

Going forward does not mean abandoning Javascript, just abandoning ES5

link
Touche 4157 days ago
I don't foresee type annotations being standardized any time soon. The resistance to that is going to be fierce.
link
discreteevent 4157 days ago
Brendan Eich made the following comment here recently:

" Indeed we had structural types in ES4 toward the end, and almost bluffed MS into folding (I'm told by a reliable source). But ES4 was trying for too much too soon. At this point we really need to see ES6/7 and TypeScript + Flow "gene- culture co-evolution". As I said at the last TC39 meeting on the topic, big de-facto standard wins trump rushed de-jure standards any day. /be"

and also:

" Type system implementors and the JS stewards must communicate well for this to win. It's looking good so far, on Ecma TC39: JQuery, Facebook, Netflix, PayPal (Ebay originally, and again), Twitter all represented along with Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla. Also academic researchers from various universities, all of whom love type systems and theory :-)."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8906807

link