I’m making the most of a late flurry of snow in the alps, this week, finishing up the winter season on the slopes with my family. And I’m going from the snow to the sun next week, as I head across to Singapore for some internal planning meetings.
I do expect to blog pretty much as usual, during the course of these two weeks, though (I’ve still got too much to talk about regarding AutoCAD 2016, for one thing).
A topic that I wanted to share today is regarding a MOOC I’m currently following via edX. It started last week – and only a few modules have been posted, so far – so now’s a great time to join, if you’re interested.
The class is an Introduction to TypeScript: Microsoft’s superset of JavaScript that allows you to develop code using higher-level language features (e.g. classes, which JavaScript currently doesn’t support) that can then be emitted to runtime JavaScript code that works on any device. The AutoCAD team uses TypeScript to create our own JavaScript layer for AutoCAD, for instance.
So far the class has covered a few basics regarding the language tools: how to automatically convert TypeScript files into JavaScript using gulp or grunt, for instance. I expect things to get more interesting very quickly, as the course focuses more on features of the language itself.
In case you’re wondering if TypeScript is likely to be around in the long-term, here’s a couple of things to bear on mind. TypeScript is completely open source and has (somewhat surprisingly, for many of us) been adopted by Google for their AtScript superset (which it now appears will basically be folded into the core TypeScript language from the recently-announced 1.5 version). So Google’s AngularJS team is implementing Angular 2 using TypeScript. We live in interesting times, to say the least.
Anyway – I encourage you to go ahead and sign up for this class. I expect to post more of my own samples using TypeScript (with the translated JavaScript accompanying it), once I’ve myself become more familiar with it.
