TypeScript: a language for application-scale JavaScript development

I will admit MS have impressed me here. The fact they've released TypeScript under an Apache 2.0 licence and put the code up on CodePlex goes to show Microsoft are making strides in the open source community. A big change considering the mentality of MS used to be open source was unsafe and a threat to their dominance in the software industry. The world must be ending: Apple is starting to falter and Microsoft is climbing back to the top.

I love how everyone is an instant expert on the Internet, even if they have only heard of the issue minutes before. I'm not a random internet conspiracist. I'm an established member of this community reporting what happened to someone that I considered a friend at the time that it happened.

Here is the story as I remember it.

The private lawsuit that Ed Curry had standing to bring was a complex contract violation between himself and Microsoft. The fact that Microsoft was not carrying through with their obligations left Ed Curry with very poor personal finances. Therefore any lawyer who took the case on would be doing so on contingency. No matter how many other lawsuits may have been filed, it is not a particularly easy matter to find a lawyer who is willing to spend years in a private lawsuit against pockets as deep as Microsoft's in the hope that someday, maybe, you'll get a big enough settlement to justify it.

So what were Ed Curry's other options?

Well he was aware that Microsoft was breaking the law in a rather egregious way. Windows NT 3.5.0 service pack 3 had a C2 certification. Ed knew this, he is the person who had done that security evaluation. (Which he did on the very contract that Microsoft was breaking the terms on.)

However Microsoft was advertising that Windows NT 4.0 had a C2 clearance. And was selling that into government departments whose regulations required that clearance. Ed Curry was aware of the false advertising, and the lack of clearance, and was furthermore aware that major design decisions, such as putting third party graphics drivers into ring 0, made the attack surface against Windows NT 4.0 sufficiently large that it could not qualify for C2 certification. (Historical note, Windows NT 4.0 never got that certification. But many years later, on service pack 6, they got a British certification that they claimed was equivalent.)

But what could he do about that? Microsoft was clearly breaking the law. But as a private individual, Ed did not have standing to sue Microsoft for the false advertising. He's not the wronged party, you need someone like the attorney general to sue. But Microsoft was politically connected, and getting those people interested is difficult.

What Ed decided to do - in retrospect it was clearly a mistake - was to go public with Microsoft's lawbreaking in the hope that he could get the attention of someone sufficiently highly placed to force Microsoft to follow the law. That's when Microsoft went nuclear. They paid every one of his clients to go elsewhere. After his company went bankrupt, when he got a job they paid that company to preemptively fire him. After several months of this, he died of a heart attack.

Incidentally you may wonder why Microsoft broke their contract with him in the first place. The reason was simple. They came to him with NT 4.0, and said that they wanted C2 clearance. He came back and said that it would never pass, and explained why. They told him to lie so that they could get the certification. When he refused to lie, they decided that they would punish him for failing to cooperate, and decided to not live up to their side of the agreement, safe in the knowledge that he was not going to have a reasonable chance of successfully suing them for it.

That's what happened, and I don't much care whether you happen to believe it. I was there, you weren't, and people who are active on HN will make up their own minds about me.

Those "improvements" really don't address what is wrong with the DOM. The problem with the DOM isn't that it could use a more consistent API with better interface naming.

The DOM simply is a poor abstraction for applications. For example, it doesn't have a concurrency model and many modifications to the styling of individual elements or changes to the DOM structure can cause repaints and reflows.

This looks excellent a nice restrained effort. Hasn't fallen into the trap that ActionScript3 did with too much ceremony, and its nice to see a syntactic super-setting approach rather than Dart's.

Now what I'd like to see in Javascripts evolution (non backwards compatible):

    * Subract: Removing parts of the language - let crockford free to rip out the bad parts.
    * Enhance: Bring in some more taste of Scheme.
    * Replace: New scoping for var etc, without introducing new keywords.

ECMAScript 4 looked a lot like ActionScript 3 up until the whole thing was suddenly killed. I don't care too much what a language is supposed to look like years from now if everything goes right. This goes double for languages with a tortured history of failure when it comes to big changes.