We had JavaScript, then we had Flash, then we had Silverlight and then HTML5 ownd them all. So what is the motivation behind TypeScript? What problems are going to be tackled and what improvements do we get with TypeScript?http://www.typescriptlang.org/
What is the motivation behind TypeScript?
web development;javascript;typescript
Looks to me like it's a statically-typed, class-based language that compiles down to JavaScript.  It's a good idea, and one that others have had as well.The advantages should be obvious to anyone who's developed in both statically-typed, class-based languages and in JavaScript: First and foremost, a compiler.  Being able to check for obvious correctness problems caused by typos or carelessness prior to deployment is something that most developers take for granted until they have to do web development, and then it's suddenly yanked out from under their feet. Browsers are designed to make the browsing experience pleasant at the expense of proper testing and debugging facilities, and the standard solution, JSLint, is no substitute for a real compiler as it misses some obvious correctness problems and mixes a bunch of style-checker complaints in with its reports. Having a real compiler is a huge step forward.And along similar lines, a type system.  Type systems improve your code by making it easier to read (you know exactly what's being passed into a function, and what it can do, just by looking at the parameter list, for example,) and by enforcing a certain degree of correctness at compile time. (If you're expecting a specific object type, passing an integer is an error. JavaScript will let you do that and then it blows up when you try to run it; a compiler with a type system will catch it and report an error for you.)So as we see, the basic idea is a very good one.  Having said that, I can't say anything about the language itself because I have no experience with it.  But I've used Smart (linked to above) and found it to be an incredibly powerful and useful tool for web development.