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Comment by drharris | Hacker News Reader

This title is greatly misleading. The article (nor what it's talking about) has nothing to do with a "C# on Javascript" runtime, and that would be ludicrous. Anders is a language designer, so it makes a lot of sense he would use his knowledge to help improve language support for the next big thing. C# has matured; Javascript can still use some work.

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Agreed - the real news here is that Anders Hejlsberg is doing something that not only isn't C#, but is JS-related. Surprising, and therefore immediately interesting.

Where's that headline changing mod, when you need him? ;)

In general, the evolution of JavaScript from most-ridiculed to one of the most-used languages is surprising.

I don't think JS ever registered in my mind as most ridiculed at all. If it was, it was just by folks that didn't know better.

Consider this:

At Goto in Aarus [1] Anders is giving a keynote on "A yet to be disclosed project in the Development Tools space".

Sometime in the last 2 days this page [1] changed. It previously listed a co-presenter with Anders from the Chakra JavaScript team.

Not sure why the other presenter (can't remember his name) was removed; it could be as simple as he can't make the trip. Or Microsoft was afraid of letting the cat out of the bag too early?

[1] http://gotocon.com/aarhus-2012/presentation/Closing%20Keynot...

Oddly ms already has/had some sort of 'compiler'. Memory is fuzzy on it, internal use and only used to build one thing, libs for messenger in browser I think.

IIRC they employ the guy who wrote Script# and they use it for some projects.

You're thinking of Script# (http://scriptsharp.com/) and it's used at the very least to develop the Office web apps as well as Exchange's Outlook Web Access.

I'd suspect they have several tools like this for code portability. It's relatively trivial to make a simple translator that compiles to Javascript; take CoffeeScript for example. I'd be surprised if there weren't all sorts of tools like these floating around Redmond. The notion of a "runtime" sitting on top of Javascript? That doesn't even make sense. It would also be a waste of Anders's strengths. His strength is in taking something popular and making it modern and usable (e.g. Java -> C#). Coming from him, I'd expect more along the lines of a framework or language extension or ECMA contribution than a runtime or compiler.

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