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Comment by dicytea | Hacker News Reader

It'll probably not get as much traction as Go, but for a simpler reason that may not be as ideologically satisfying for you. It's just really hard for a new language to get real traction, no matter how good it is. And it's even harder for transpiled languages, because they almost always gets overshadowed by the language they're transpiling to.

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What I find truly fascinating is that given the complexity of most build systems (especially ones that use babel) basically every node project I encounter is in fact effectively transpiled, it's just it's "javascript compiled to javascript" rather than having a different source syntax.

I don't even mind[0], I think it's actually kind of amazing.

[0] I have all the usual complaints about build systems and about the node ecosystem in general, but I don't think the fact that it's javascript compiled to javascript in and of itself is a problem, only, well, almost everything about how that's usually implemented/achieved :D

But it's the minimal translation to allow newer language features and APIs to be still used in older browsers.

OTOH I haven't seen a pure JavaScript project for a number of years. It's all Typescript now, maybe with some vestiges of legacy JS slated for eventual migration to TS.

There are people who insist on writing JS (with types in JSDoc), but Svelte is the only such project I can name off the top of my head.

I tend to start off a project with typeless zero-build JS, because I've been working with dynamic languages so long that the types mostly don't actually help me find bugs in the early days, but if I don't convert it to reasonably typed TS before I release a 0.001.001 then I would expect people to judge me for it, and I would consider them to have every right to do so.

Much of it is such minimal translation.

Much, not so much.

I see JSX as basically 'compiling augmented javascript to javascript,' much of decorators is much like that as well, and things like e.g. vue's turning expressions on its reactivity based signals seen in templates into something more clever is also in the category I was trying to gesture at.

(TS is awesome but I should've predeclared that it wasn't really what I had in mind, sorry for any confusion induced by that mistake on my part)

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