JavaScript is a sh*tshow
 Welcome to #124. Congrats to our final winner of The Festival of Bytes, Timothy Whitbeck, for being the 200th person to respond to the last issue and winning the SNES. For those curious, 417 of you responded. Today, we’ve got a big bowl of blue kool-aid, a controversial name for my newborn, and core memories of Parachute Day.  The Main Thing Look how big you're getting! Ten Years of TypesTypeScript turned 10 years old on Saturday, and since none of you showed up for the birthday party, we decided to throw one ourselves. So whether you’ve been a true believer since day Where we’ve been: If you think JavaScript is a sh*tshow today, you should’ve seen it back in 2007. Not only was the language itself much less robust that it is now, but members of the TC39 Committee couldn’t agree on what it should become going forward. Microsoft, in particular, objected to many of the larger changes being proposed in ES4 at the time, because they deemed them too big and too risky for this simple scripting language, which was (in their opinion) “never designed to be a programming language for big applications.” So after ES4 failed to reach consensus, Anders Hejlsberg and his team went deep into the Microsoft lair for a few years and eventually came back with TypeScript — a JavaScript superset that augmented JS by adding new, “application-scale” features like classes, modules, and static typing. But if we fast forward to today, JavaScript has now added most of those features to the Spec. So why is TypeScript still hotter than There are lots of reasons for TypeScript’s popularity, but most of them fall into one of three categories:
Where we go from here: TypeScript’s meteoric rise over the past 10 years seems like it’ll keep on meteor-ing for a while. More and more companies are using it for their enterprise apps (Anders called his shot) — so if you haven’t had to learn it yet, it’s probably just a matter of time. Add in the proliferation of AI-assisted programming tools like Copilot (which are even more powerful when used in a TypeScript codebase), and it seems like TypeScript is poised to become even more entrenched over the next 10 years. See y’all in 2032.
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Spot the Bug
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Trunk is a DevEx toolkit that basically tricks you and your team into following best practices. You’ll test, merge, and monitor your code without feeling like you’re actually doing any of that boring stuff. Check it out.
const user = {
name: 'Tyler',
age: 32,
greet() {
alert(`Hello, my name is ${this.name}`)
},
mother: {
name: 'Jan',
greet() {
alert(`Hello, my name is ${this.mother.name}`)
}
}
}
user.mother.greet()
Cool Bits
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Christoph Nakazawa created this minimal, fast starter template for Vite, React, TypeScript and Tailwind that he appropriately named
vite-ts-react-tailwind-template. And yet, everyone in my family says I’m crazy for wanting to name my newborn babylumpy-tiny-human-boy. -
CarbonQA provides QA services geared for dev teams. They’ll boost your team’s morale sky-high by… breaking your code repeatedly. But the good news is that you’ll never have to waste time on testing again. They work in your tools, talk with your team on Slack, and let your devs be devs. [sponsored]
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Jenna Smith wrote a good article about Progressive Enhancement for a more resilient web. Because all of a sudden, every web developer is more obsessed with PE than a bunch of elementary school kids on Parachute Day.
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Liqe is a lightweight Lucene-like parser, serializer and search engine. So I guess you can dere-LIQE my JSON, cap-i-tan.
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Julian Benegas wrote about how Vercel is Serving millions of users on the new MrBeast storefront. But we all know this is just part of Guillermo’s 35-part plan to get in a MrBeast video.
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CodeGeeX is an open-source, large-scale multilingual code generation model with 13 billion parameters. This looks like a cool OSS alternative to GitHub Copilot — but the downside is that if you don’t pay for Copilot, Bill Gates might not be able to afford to buy as many giant ping pong paddles. So, tradeoffs.
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Our friends at Supabase just open sourced
postgres-wasm, a PostgresQL server that runs inside a browser. Why? Why tf not? -
Cloudflare just released Turnstile — a “user-friendly, privacy-preserving alternative” to Google’s reCAPTCHA. And Cloudflare’s CEO wrote a beautifully sarcastic comment about it on Hacker News that has inspired us to officially offer him a job as a part-time Bytes writer. Matthew, we can’t offer you the same salary and perks you’re getting now, but we can promise that you’ll never have to be on an earnings call again. Think about it.
const user = {
name: 'Tyler',
age: 32,
greet() {
alert(`Hello, my name is ${this.name}`)
},
mother: {
name: 'Jan',
greet() {
alert(`Hello, my name is ${this.mother.name}`)
}
}
}
user.mother.greet()
When we invoke user.mother.greet, we can tell what the this keyword is referencing by looking to the “left of the dot” of the invocation – in this case, mother.
So inside of greet, it’s as if we had my name is ${mother.mother.name}, which is clearly wrong. Instead, since the this keyword is referencing mother, we can just do this.name.
const user = {
name: 'Tyler',
age: 32,
greet() {
alert(`Hello, my name is ${this.name}`)
},
mother: {
name: 'Jan',
greet() {
alert(`Hello, my name is ${this.name}`)
}
}
}
user.mother.greet()