Oh man, the mention of ScriptSharp brought back memories. I started my career at MSFT on SharePoint and the front end was an ungodly mix of ScriptSharp and other stuff.

I vividly remember being in a meeting with the Exchange team (about building shared frontend components) arguing for us to adopt TS instead as it had a better experience and very rapidly growing popularity (that was about 10 years ago). Plus, as strong as Nikhil [0] was, he was basically the only person behind ScriptSharp while TS had a whole team.

Of course, this being MSFT, this effort went no where. While true that the TS toolchain lacked the tree-shaking that ScriptSharp had, I was just annoyed that we had to build stuff using what was obviously an dead-ish language with limited support, many flaws, and no resources to improve it.

But hey, at least it wasn’t GWT.

[0] https://github.com/nikhilk

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culi 2 days ago | parent [-]

From what I've read, many of TypeScript's design regrets have political origins. Enums and other features that oppose TS's structural type system were added as compromises with C# developers in MS and similar negotiations with the Angular team in order to increase adoption of TypeScript over alternatives

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pavo-etc 2 days ago | parent [-]

I would love to know where you read this!

	▲	culi 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Oh gosh, I don't think I can recall a specific source. I've listened to many interviews with the TypeScript team and in Q&A they're often asked about their "biggest regrets". Early on TypeScript's adoption was far from a sure thing. After convincing Microsoft their biggest threat was Angular's own AtScript (and maybe even Flow). TypeScript was extremely beholden to whatever Microsoft or Angular devs wanted to be added to the language in order for them to agree to push TypeScript as the future