TypeScript is now a 'top 10' language – just in time for the 'feature complete' 3.6 beta Microsoft's TypeScript 3.6 beta, pushed out just before the weekend, is "intended to be feature complete", according to program manager Daniel Rosenwasser. TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript designed to make it more suitable for building large applications. Newly released programming language rankings from analysts …
Nope, still would rather debug my defective eyes with a logic probe.
On a less gouging note: Sure you can write a little logic in CSS, but as it's just descriptors I wouldn't say that it was Turing-complete without an html page to act on.
So what's that doing there?
I dunno if CSS is Turing-complete but the latest versions have grown so many bells & whistles that some maniac was able to build a chat client with it
Well, I'd say that's more JS-less; the html and server-side scripting are doing all the heavy-lifting.
Without any actions or real nouns I have trouble defining CSS as a language.
You're right, though; with pagination header and footer descriptors CSS is starting to look more like one, so it may get there eventually.
... a manuscript is a hand written document, a typescript is a hand typed document.
So why is it that whenever I see "MS TypeScript" my brain automatically jumps to the 'orrible thought of how badly MS could completely cock-up PostScript ... and does Adobe really need any help with that?
Microsoft did attempt their own version of PostScript at one point, in cahoots with Apple of all people, in an attempt to take Adobe down a peg or two (or at least to provide a bargaining chip they could use when negotiating the licences for Adobe's technology). It was called TrueImage, being the complement to TrueType which Apple contributed to the endeavour. It seems to have sunk without a trace; IIRC, what Microsoft delivered was such a streaming jobbie that Apple went back to Adobe tall between legs. Still, at least we got TrueType fonts out of the mess, which were infinitely preferable to arsing about with Adobe Type Manager... (trails off into greybeard muttering about Ye Elder Dayes)
XPS was a typical Microsoft play: an open standard equivalent already existed (XSL:FO) but, no, they had to roll their own... and having done so, let it languish. You know, guys, there's no shame in leaving figurative money on the table, or a pie unfingered¹-- especially if you're going to stand there with your finger in the pie and a gormless expression on your face like you're expecting some kind of prize just for turning up.
One of these days, I'll print a document to the XPS driver that exists on just about every Windows box, just for giggles...
¹ Cough. I'll get me coat...
Adobe created Adobe Type Manager, later split into ATM Light (free) and ATM Deluxe (bags o'cash). Adobe also charged hefty royalties for PostScript on printers; a major reason why Apple's original LaserWriter cost $7000 when it was based on non-PS laser printers costing $3000-3500 was the Adobe tax. A combination of TrueType and 3rd-party PS-alikes such as GhostScript allowed users (such as me...) to get most of the value of PS without having to buy a PS printer. I was using TrueType, ATM Light, and GhostScript and similar to drive Apple StyleWriter and StyleWriter II inkjets for the better part of a decade; they were slow, but they gave good (for the time) output and were a lot cheaper than LaserWriters. Adobe cut the price of ATM Deluxe and added features (I still didn't buy it, there were other, cheaper, not-from-those-bastards-at-Adobe applications which had ATM Deluxe's feature set and more) and finally stopped development because a lot of people didn't buy it, but still used it; for a while there it was the single most pirated software on Macs. (For some reason people objected to being raped by Adobe. Imagine that.) Well, the most pirated software that wasn't a font, anyway. As Adobe wanted (and still does want) outrageous amounts of money for fonts ($3000 for the Font Folio! and that's a significant price drop over what it used to be!) there was and is an awful lot of font piracy. I used to work in the printing industry and for a long time when ads came in the ad company would include the fonts, we'd stick 'em on our computers, and print the ad. (Things have changed now, but in the mid 1990s I had over 8000 fonts on my computer, accessed using a font manager, plus another 2000+ archived. (No, I'm not exaggerating. Look up how many different versions of, say, Helvetica, there are. Then look at the slightly different versions of those versions from different font foundries. Ad companies would refuse to pay if we didn't use _their_ Helvetica. We were not paying for all those fonts. I hate ad companies.)
Apple found it easier to license ATM Light, but made it quite clear that if the price went up they'd just build their own. And would license it to Microsoft. Adobe's prices went down and stayed down, 'cause Apple had the ability to destroy a major part of their business. With OS X, Apple leveraged their control of TrueType and their access to 'creative professionals' to get a really good deal for the code for ATM Light and built it into OS X. They also built their very own Display PostScript code, completely independent of Adobe, and use that for all display and printing on Macs and iOS devices. They haven't licensed it to Microsoft, but they could. Adobe lives in fear that Windows will finally get a real display and print engine. All those PDF printers and PDF editors on Windows don't exist on Macs; to print PDF (or PostScript) files Mac users just click on a pull-down menu in the print dialog for Every.Single.Printer, all of them, which works with a Mac, and can do basic PDF editing with utilities which ship with the OS. Acrobat and various 3rd-party PDF editors have to offer serious capabilities and even so have limited take-up.
Oh Gawd, you're causing serious flashbacks here. For my sins I worked for Corel after I graduated uni, mid 90s. The Tech Support people were forever having to explain to customers that just because you got 1,000 fonts in the box, you didn't have to install them all, especially not without installing the free font manager you also got in the box. IIRC, Windows 3 and 95 used to get decidedly ill if you installed more than 500 fonts at a time...
Fonts are a weird business. I can't think of anything that's more labour-intensive and yet as undervalued as creating a good font-- because if you're doing it right, most people won't even notice a well-made one. Yet it will have taken a significant amount of effort-- designing the glyphs, tweaking the kerning pairs, hinting-- all that work that most people won't appreciate, and which can be swiped in seconds by any fecker copying a .ttf or .otf file. You can't even copyright a design (presumably because back in the day copying a font meant actually making your own metal type, in which case good luck to you), hence like you say the number of bootleg almost-but-not-quite-the-same Helveticas knocking about.
Kudos to MS for giving good options to the web software community.
But this is crazy; we have a typed language that gets compiled to an un-typed language that then gets interpreted by a runtime that has to execute code on a CPU whose opcodes are "typed", synthesizing the untypedness in the process. Have we not got too many layers here?
If TypeScript does take off in a major way, and the folly of JavaScript is widely acknowledged, surely it'd be best to ditch the unnecessary crud? And then wouldn't TypeScript become the very thing (ish?) that Java tried and failed to be? Isn't the apparently good reception enjoyed by TypeScript simply an acknowledgement that a lot of what's gone on for the past decade or so is, well, badly thought out?
I blame Google. I expect JavaScript, like everything else they touch, is earmarked for depracation.
I'm waiting for them (whoever them is) to sort out the 'optional semicolon' mess. I'm all for optional semicolons, but they really should only be inserted if you *don't* have a clearly unterminated expression when you get to the end of the line (bring back BCPL which got this right). But I bet that would break most if the incomprehensible and badly written javascript on the web
Fun thing to do. Go into firefox about:config and set javascript.options.strict and watch the warnings flow
No objection to optional semicolons, but I'm puzzled that it's such an eagerly requested feature. I must spend most of my working day ending statements with semicolons, but it's not something I'm aware of, and I certainly wouldn't rate it as a significant annoyance. I don't expect a massive surge in productivity when we're freed from the burden of semicolons.
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