[cs-szazz]

(not a frontend dev, so excuse any ignorance)

I agree CoffeeScript usage has gone down dramatically, but has Typescript not usurped it? It doesn't seem like everyone just went back to using JS, so maybe Scala was CoffeeScript, and Kotlin is closer to Typescript?

[klodolph]

TypeScript is in a unique position. It's basically a set of extensions to JavaScript, and with a very short list of exceptions, those extensions only affect the type system. You can mostly just convert TypeScript to JavaScript by going through your source files, selecting various ranges of text, and pressing "delete" on your keyboard. This is more or less how the TypeScript compiler compiles your code anyway.

The exception I can think of is enum types. These always result in some amount of generated code.

TypeScript can also apply some other transformations to your code during compilation, but as far as I know that's just so you can use newer JavaScript language features and target older JavaScript runtimes.

[afavour]

I don't want to stretch metaphors too far here but there's some truth in what you're saying. TypeScript usage is a tiny minority of JavaScript usage but it's climbing and I'm sure it's much higher than CoffeeScript ever was.

But I see TypeScript as a different beast altogether because of its aims. CoffeeScript and Kotlin were both created to make a complicated messy language more straightforward and powerful. TypeScript aims to make JavaScript safer by introducing types. If anything it slows development down, not makes it faster (and before someone jumps on me for saying that: yes, I think it's worth the price). IMO that makes comparisons difficult.

[apatheticonion]

> TypeScript usage is a tiny minority of JavaScript usage

shudders at the thought

After using TypeScript for almost 5 years now, I can not imagine a scenario where I would write JavaScript without type safety - other than a 5 minute POC to test something out.

I look forward to the day when TypeScript can be compiled to wasm binaries and it can be a language all on it's own rather than a superset/wrapper of JavaScript.

[cs-szazz]

That's fair, though I will say Kotlin's type system having nullability built-in is something I doubt Java will ever fully add (instead of the annotations it currently uses). So in that respect, it's making it more type safe, but the delta between Kt and Java isn't near as big as TS and JS.

[root_axis]

> If anything it slows development down, not makes it faster

It doesn't really "slow development down", it just forces you to explicitly specify the data structures that exist whether you decide to acknowledge them or not. Eschewing types is just a form of technical debt that every developer has to repay as they deduce the application data structures through trial and error, often times in production.

[michaelmior]

Scala still has a reasonably strong following :) I think largely as a result of Spark.

[rgblambda]

That strong following might not last. My company made the decision to have PySpark be the default for training and future greenfield Spark projects, and they're only really making official what's been the reality for the past few years. A shame, as Scala seems like a nice language but I've never really gotten into it as Python is always the preferred option.