DEV Community

Discussion on: If you could write a programming language how would it be?

Collapse
 
eljayadobe profile image
Eljay-Adobe

... no setting a variable to a type other than its initial ...

At a previous company, they developed a language called TypeScript that transpiles into JavaScript (ES3 or ES5). (Sorry Bob van Hoove... yep, transpiles.)

One of its features was static type checking, which went a long way to eliminate a large category of bugs. The folks at Google liked it so much, that they used it for Angular 2.

I worked on a very large project that used TypeScript throughout, and it was pretty nice. (TypeScript also made available a lot of ES6 features, way before ES6 was ready for primetime. So that was very cool too, at that time.)

Now we have ES6 at our disposal, so at least one big feature that TypeScript still provides is the static type checking.

Maybe some future version of JavaScript (ECMA-262 and ISO/IEC 16262) will add that into the core language.

Collapse
 
nektro profile image
Meghan (she/her)

TypeScript is very cool and I especially like their idea of automatic constructor property assignment but unfortunately, TS isn't supported natively and must be transpiled :(