Guido van Rossum

There are certainly plenty of people who don't use TypeScript,

just use the original JavaScript notation, just like there are many people in the Python world who don't use type annotations and don't use static type checkers.

Well, in the JavaScript world, transpilers are sort of the standard way of working anyway, which is why TypeScript being a transpiler itself is not a big deal.

That's right.

At the same time, an interesting development in the JavaScript slash TypeScript world at the moment is that

There is a proposal under consideration, it's only a stage one proposal, that proposes to add a feature to JavaScript where, just like Python, it will ignore certain syntax when running the JavaScript code.

And what it ignores is more or less a superset of the TypeScript annotation syntax.

So that would mean that eventually, if you wanted to, you could take TypeScript and you could shove it directly into a JavaScript interpreter without transpilation.

The interesting thing in the JavaScript world, at least the web browser world, the web browsers have changed how they deploy and they sort of update their JavaScript engines

much more quickly than they used to in the early days.

And so there's much less of a need for transpilation in JavaScript itself, because most browsers just support the most recent version of ECMAScript.

I would recommend TypeScript.

It's an enormously helpful extra tool that helps you sort of keep your head straight about what your code is actually doing.

I mean, it helps with editing your code.

It helps with ensuring that your code is not too incorrect.

And it's actually...

quite compatible with JavaScript, never mind this syntactic sort of hack that is still years in the future.

But any library that is written in pure JavaScript can still be used from TypeScript programs.

And also the other way around, you can write a library in TypeScript and then export it in a form that is totally consumable by JavaScript.

That sort of compatibility is sort of the key to the success of TypeScript.