Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Find: Microsoft TypeScript - the JavaScript we need, or a solution looking for a problem?

Nice review of js variants and competitors. 

Microsoft TypeScript: the JavaScript we need, or a solution looking for a problem?

For all JavaScript's prominence as the lingua franca of Web development, there are an awful lot of developers who don't like it a whole lot, and as a result, a great many efforts to produce something better.

As is typical among programmers, nobody can quite agree on which bits of JavaScript are the problem. For some, JavaScript is mostly good enough, just a little awkward and ugly to write, so we have, for example, the popular CoffeeScript language. CoffeeScript makes a lot of changes to JavaScript's syntax, and uses JavaScript's object-oriented capabilities in a particular way, but doesn't fundamentally alter the way the language works.

Others think that the semantics of the language (the rules governing its behavior) are a problem too, so we have projects like Google's Dart, which offer both new syntax and behavior. And then there are the things like Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and Script#, which adopt wholesale the language and behavior of, respectively, Java and C#, merely compiling to JavaScript for actual execution.

No comments:

Post a Comment