[dba-VS] TypeScript

[Gustav Brock]

Hi all

Today I attended a lecture by Anders Hejlsberg - you know, the man behind Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, and now TypeScript. A free event not to miss.

Code-wise it was a beginner's course, which felt a bit strange, but - as you can imagine - he quickly managed to give it a much broader perspective and, indeed, a good understanding of the background for "why TypeScript?".

Very inspiring, and should you be in doubt, this is hot. I should add, that if you today program in Javascript (I see all hands) you should at once turn to TypeScript. The well-known arguments - which he brightly demonstrated the value of - are classes, strong typing, and - because of the strong typing - IntelliSense. Even then it compiles to pure non-expanded Javascript. It is so clever:

http://www.typescriptlang.org/

It is open-source and expanding at high speed:

https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/

In addition to Visual Studio, a range of other editors are at hand. For much of the demo he used Sublime Text:

http://www.sublimetext.com/

which has the special feature that it can show - in real time a split-pane window with TypeScript at left and the resulting Javascript at right. It is not free but worth considering at USD 70 if you plan to typescript a lot. It runs on all relevant platforms.

/gustav