TypeScript is better than JavaScript in most situations. JavaScript is all that remained after the plugin-based alternatives were killed off. It’s not that TypeScript is a terrible language, but being a better language is a low bar to clear when you consider that we have 20+ years of extra experience since the early days of JS and a new language also wouldn’t inherit all the baggage.
Things that IMHO have the potential to create a profoundly better language for developing web applications include:
• A more expressive type and effect system
• A more capable module system and better dependency management
• A more comprehensive standard library
• Integral support for building distributed systems and modelling communication within them
Given those kinds of changes and avoiding a lot of the baggage, I think there is also room for a simpler, more systematic, more consistent syntax, which would be good for both human and computer readers. The latter is important because if it’s easily machine-readable then it’s easier to build tools, and building good tools around a programming language is a key factor in growing a large and sustainable ecosystem.
I don’t know what being “10x better than TypeScript” would mean quantitatively, but I find it easy to believe that a language could arrive within say the next 5 years that required less than half the time to develop the same functionality, produced less than half the defects that would need fixing later, and ran several times faster under realistic conditions.
