At Fluent 2013, O’Reilly’s conference dedicated to the Web Platform, JavaScript and HTML5, Microsoft’s Luke Hoban spoke about TypeScript, a strict superset of JavaScript that adds optional static typing, modules, and classes.
In Introduction to TypeScript, Luke presented a 40 minute introduction to the language, how it relates to JavaScript and ECMAScript 6, and how TypeScript looks and behaves in IDE environments and within the context of complete applications.
TypeScript is an open source project from Microsoft that aims to help developers work on larger applications that could benefit from features like static typing but without eschewing JavaScript and its wealth of libraries and tools. As TypeScript is a strict superset of JavaScript, all JavaScript code is legitimate TypeScript code and TypeScript compiles down to idiomatic JavaScript so it runs on any runtime that JavaScript does too.
Some key parts of Todd’s talk include:
- What is TypeScript? [at 01:48]
- A demo of TypeScript [at 05:14]
- A look at how typing helps [at 06:40]
- How classes in TypeScript work [at 16:20]
- The TypeScript ecosystem / community [at 21:53]
- TypeScript 0.9 [at 25:48]
- A look at generics support [at 29:18]
- TypeScript in the context of a full app [at 34:40]
If you want to learn more about TypeScript, check out the official TypeScript homepage which includes a simple tutorial and an interactive playground that lets you type TypeScript code on the left hand side of the screen and see the JavaScript translation on the right.