Programming Language Trends

It’s interesting to see a strong parallel of programming language development from some software and Internet giants.

Facebook recently released Hack as an open source project. The gist of Hack is that it’s a PHP superset that adds in static type safety, a compiler (not an interpreter), and a JITed run-time environment. The proposition to a developer is threefold. 1) The compiler will catch a large class of errors that otherwise would be found at run-time. 2) Better performance than a straight-up PHP interpreter 3) You get to leverage most of your existing PHP as a starting point, thereby allowing you to do stepwise migration of your codebase to Hack.

TypeScript, from software behemoth Microsoft, was developed to leverage a growing trend in yet another dynamic language, JavaScript. JavaScript’s evolution certainly has surprised me. It’s evolved from a sort of kludgy in-browser language to a full-fledged software ecosystem. Node.js has cemented JavaScript into the world of HTML-centric application development while allowing development of web-scale services as well. TypeScript, similar to Hack, is a JavaScript superset that compiles to JavaScript. Clever, no? The parallels between Hack and TypeScript are 1) static typing (i.e. compilers catch gross errors), 2) The new languages are supersets of their predecessor and 3) The projects are open source

I suspect tool vendors like JetBrains to hack in Hack intellisense support and debugging into their IDEs in due time. Microsoft already has TypeScript built into VisualStudio for those developers who are addicted to Intellisense (easy to get addicted) and the general goodness of and integrated development of environment. Microsoft also recognizes the power of Node.js and has worked overtime in making sure that TypeScript lives comfortably within server-side JavaScript environs.

It’s a good day to be a software engineer!