Comment by digitalzombie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by digitalzombie | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, a few weeks old news. But yeah, their new frontend rendering 2.0 is in type script (brainfart can't remember name). Update: angularjs 2.0

In general I think Google should work with other browser such as Mozilla and Microsoft if they want a default language. I think Mozilla is firmly with Javascript seeing how they have Brendan Eich (creator of javascript).

I'm also hoping there is a good alternative to javascript supported out of the box from other browsers. No transpiler. Don't get me wrong, I've invested a lot in learning Javascript but I really dislike it when you're writing tons of lines of code. Reason being it's loosely type and dynamic.

edit:

The reason for me thinking Mozilla sticking to javascript. They have lots of project in javascript, PDF renderer, etc.. They also have already allocating resources into Rust. And for a while now Microsoft and Google have offer their take on an alternative javascript (type script & dart). I don't recall Mozilla offering any alternative to javascript.

Google works on SoundScript [https://developers.google.com/v8/experiments]: graudual but sound typing for JavaScript with the goal to allow for more aggressive optimisation in the VM.

> I think Mozilla is firmly with Javascript seeing how they have Brendan Eich (creator of javascript).

had.

Brendan Eich left Mozilla a while back.

It sounds like you want Typescript and Flow. And they already exists. We shouldn't add another high level language in the browser. Developers are happy enough transpiling code and coupling language features to browser upgrade cycles doesn't make sense.

"...Developers are happy enough transpiling code..." - happy the way disaster survivors are happy to live in makeshift sheds rather than, you know, being dead. And the number of shed designs on offer doesn't matter.

> I don't recall Mozilla offering any alternative to javascript.

Mozilla is offering two alternatives to what most people probably mean by "JavaScript" (ECMAScript 3 or 5):

1) A better JavaScript, where more of missing things people complain about are present and most of the present things people complain about have options they're less likely to complain about (though a certain famous quote by Stroustrup comes to mind).

2) JavaScript as a well-performing target, something for people whose reasons for complaining are either subjective or simply unaddressable to go to without deeply fragmenting the browser-as-runtime.

Typescript is JavaScript with some minimal annotations.

I'm all in favour of TypeScript instead of JS. Unlike CoffeeScript (despite their 'it's just javascript') it is a superset so you can just rename .js .ts. So really TS: 'It's just JavaScript'.. but improved.

Yes, TS is improved since it comes with the top IDE: VS. :-P

Seriously though. Watching how people use IDE to code on Twitch can be so boring. Everyone is quick to suggest to step the code with the debugger. When just printing stuff to the console would be better.

I hope that TypeScript never makes it into the browsers. I would take JavaScript without the types by default. It can even be more static than it is. But please, no types by default. Types make for bloated code.

Someone yesterday spent 2 hours on Twitch dabbling with the Eclipse IDE and could not get unstuck, since they weren't even referring to the documentations or making quick changes to test their code.

"Types make for bloated code" - no, poor type inference does.

In theory. In practice many of the mainstream languages make for bloated code. Yesterday I was seeing type casts and so on increasing the size of the code.

But developers can grow used to bloated code. Like they can get used to stepping the code with the debugger. I for one prefer to print debug info. On the browser I have custom code that helps with that. But I understand that many developers don't have anything like that and they have to use a standard debugger instead.

I grew used to debugging with print outs on Ruby. Before that I used to use IDEs like Delphi and Eclipse.

I also hear that one of the problems people may have on OCaml is that sometimes when they want to print some data structures they first have to make it printable. I like languages that make the structures printable by default like in Ruby.

Anyways...

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