Stupid Question 56: What is TypeScript?

[To celebrate my first year of programming I will ask a ‘stupid’ questions daily on my blog for a year, to make sure I learn at least 365 new things during my second year as a developer]

The Sweden Study Group met up today to watch the fifth tutorial on Knockout by John Papa. Before we started we sat and ate and discussed javascript, the good parts, the bad parts, and the coffeescript evangelism, the future of jQuery and more. As I was setting up the projector I had a quick look at my RSS reader and noticed some news about Microsoft and something called ‘TypeScript’. I had to check it out.

Microsoft TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript

Typescript is:

TypeScript is a language for application-scale JavaScript development.
TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.
Any browser. Any host. Any OS. Open Source.

Woha!! Juicy!

I can’t help but get a ‘Dart-feeling’, and ‘CoffeeScript-feeling’, and I’m liking it. It offers classes, modules and interfaces, and most YEY for me – static checking and statement completion.

Runs in browser or in node.js So this one can go server-side. For Visual Studio users, there is a plugin, and after DevReach – on Sunday on my way home I promise a blog post about TypeScript after I play around with it a little :D

The TypeScript site
Get The Visual Studio TypeScript Plugin

Stupid Question 56: What is TypeScript?

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