You may or not be right, but Typescript seems to be gaining a reasonable amount of attention and traction outside Microsoft, so I suspect its type system may be "good enough" to add a decent degree of type safety while still staying close enough (for better or for worse) to vanilla Javascript that developers, CTOs, etc. aren't put off by the perceived difficulty/risk of a totally new language (also I guess the Microsoft backing counts for something).

There are enhancements to the type system on the roadmap, for example support for non-nullable and variadic types: https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/Roadmap

Typescript may not be perfect but I'm glad to see it getting more attention as I think it can bring a significant quality improvement to a code base for a fairly small investment of effort.

It already appeared, and is called Purescript. It's great, and it's about as likely to gain traction as Haskell.

I don't see the point made often, but I think that "Java-grade" is what a lot of developers (the backend ones) actually want. Or, rather, they'd prefer if JavaScript morphed into something closer to Java. I suspect many of the strong supporters of TypeScript come from Java/C# and just want plain JavaScript to be abstracted away.

I've gotta say that one of my main fears with TypeScript is the potential proliferation of code written in heavy OO-style where everything is a Factory or Service or Interface or Impl. And that scares the hell out of me.

I know that TypeScript does not mandate code be written that way. Neither does Java. But TypeScript makes it easier for the Java devs to carry over their heavy-OO habits rather than learning a lighter way of writing code, and that's my worry with it.

Are you arguing in favor of everyone sticking to the lowest common denominator technology just because the pace of change is too quick? I would wager that things are changing so much exactly because of this reluctance to adopt new developments at scale. It's a vicious cycle, to be sure, but plain vanilla JavaScript everywhere can't possibly be the savior!

But the typescript type definitions will still be useful. See e.g. https://github.com/sjrd/scala-js-ts-importer

Every 6 months

One major point of the article is that if such a language appears, the existence of your .d.ts file will make the transition to the new language much easier.

> not java-grade

If people hate TypeScript like they hate Java, then it's probably going to become the standard.

At that point, you can always transpile from Typescript to javascript or maybe even from Typescript to the new language.