Learning TypeScript

Chapter 1. From JavaScript to TypeScript

JavaScript today

Supports browsers decades past

Beauty of the web

Before talking about TypeScript, we need to first understand where it came from: JavaScript!

History of JavaScript

JavaScript was designed in 10 days by Brendan Eich at Netscape in 1995 to be approachable and easy to use for websites. Developers have been poking fun at its quirks and perceived shortcomings ever since. I’ll cover some of them in the next section.

JavaScript has evolved tremendously since 1995, though! Its steering committee, TC39, has released new versions of ECMAScript—the language specification that JavaScript is based on—yearly since 2015 with new features that bring it in line with other modern languages. Impressively, even with regular new language versions, JavaScript has managed to maintain backward compatibility for decades in varying environments, including browsers, embedded applications, and server runtimes.

Today, JavaScript is a wonderfully flexible language with a lot of strengths. One should appreciate that while JavaScript has its quirks, it’s also helped enable the incredible growth of web applications and the internet.

Show me the perfect programming language and I’ll show you a language with no users.

Anders Hejlsberg, TSConf 2019

Vanilla JavaScript’s Pitfalls

Developers often refer to using JavaScript without any significant language extensions or frameworks as “vanilla”: referring to it being the familiar, original flavor. I’ll soon ...