Anders Hejlsberg

And we were like, wow.

Really?

Well, gosh, well, perhaps a better approach would be to fix JavaScript.

I mean, surely you're not going to be best of breed in the JavaScript ecosystem by telling people to write in a different programming language.

Although plenty of people were like, remember CoffeeScript and all of these other languages that targeted JavaScript, right?

Yes, they were super popular.

I mean, like so many different things did that.

But JavaScript is actually a pretty decent little language.

There are just some things missing.

You got to give credit there to Brendan Eich.

I mean, he understood functional programming.

And Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript.

And he got functions as first class objects right in JavaScript, which is godsend and beautiful.

But it doesn't have a type system.

And we knew from experience that you cannot build good tooling without a type system.

You can build decent tooling, but it's never going to scale.

It's never going to scale to large teams because you can't describe your intents in the code.

There's no way of formalizing any of this stuff and there's no way of analyzing it and there's no way of using it.

in an IDE to give you statement completion and refactoring and go to definition and find all references and blah, blah, blah, blah, all of that stuff, right?

That germinated the idea of, hey, we could create a superset of JavaScript that adds a type system, and then we could just compile it away.