I was talking to my manager the other day, discussing the languages we are using at $dayjob. He kind of offhandedly said that he thinks TypeScript is a temporary fad and soon everything will go back to using JavaScript. He doesn’t like that it’s made by Microsoft either.

I’m not a frontend developer so I don’t really know, but my general impression is that everything is moving more and more towards TypeScript, not away from it. But maybe I’m wrong?

Does anyone who actually works with TypeScript have any impression about this?

  • @[email protected]
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    488 months ago

    CoffeeScript was a fad, but TypeScript seems to gaining more and more popularity these days, with new runtimes like deno supporting them natively. TypeScript finally gave Microsoft relevancy again in webdev world, so I bet they’ll go a great length to make sure it stays that way. If Microsoft were still making their own browser engine, I bet they’ll make it natively supports TypeScript too.

    • magic_lobster_party
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      418 months ago

      CoffeeScript was a fad because it didn’t solve anyone’s problems. It was basically “look how cool code you can write”.

      TypeScript is gaining popularity because static typing solves real problems. It’s also a superset of JavaScript instead of being a completely new language from scratch, which makes it easier for JavaScript devs to learn.

      • @[email protected]
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        188 months ago

        it felt to me like coffeescript solved problems that people had, then js got equivalent features. arguably that could happen to ts as well

        • @[email protected]
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          98 months ago

          Exactly, it was pretty useful until ~2015 imho. Then JS got better, and coffeescript did not follow these evolutions.

    • Eager Eagle
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      8 months ago

      CoffeeScript wasn’t a fad, it just became obsolete because JS adopted the syntax sugar CoffeeScript was selling. In a way, it did its job.

      • @[email protected]
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        78 months ago

        Yup! All of the following features were in CoffeeScript first: Modules, classes, arrow functions, async functions, parameter defaults, …spread, destructuring, template strings.

        So I’d say it was extremely successful in making JavaScript better.