Anders Hejlsberg, the language designer integral to the development of C#, announced TypeScript last week. In summary, this is a superscript of Javascript that provides an optional way to introduce static typing to part or all of your Javascript to support the development process. It compiles down to Javascript and is fully compatible with Javascript hosts.

In a way, I think TypeScript was inevitable - it’s the clear evolution of tools like Clojure and CoffeeScript that themselves have made solid progress towards solving the problem of application scale javascript.

Microsoft’s timing is perfect for me. I am a strong proponent of SOA and have been more and more inclined as time has gone on to weave services in the UI as late as possible – but I’ve always found large javascript applications problematic to manage. TypeScript looks like it can really help take away a lot of the pain. I particularly like the virtual project system and the way you can provide idl like *.d.ts files to provide intellisense for pre-exisitng Javascript libraries.

If you do any kind of Javascript, do check it out.