Surprising to me that (in the context of TypeScript) ECMAScript 4, ActionScript, and Google Closure were not mentioned! Especially the first two; Macromedia/Adobe and Netscape/Mozilla have been working on baking TypeScript into JavaScript proper for a whole decade before HTML5, the mobile boom, and the associated problems have emerged. ES4/AS3 even had a nearly identical syntax.
What's even more interesting is that Microsoft and Google were part of TC-39 at the time, and were the main opponents of ES4. While they had some rightful reasons to take this position, there's no way ES4 hasn't shaped TS in the end. Perhaps the lack of mention of any of this is due to that TypeScript might have been handed to Anders' team after the project vision and original design have developed (in the video, it is introduced as a continuation of "SharpScript"), but the interview still left me rather insatiated.
> ES4/AS3 even had a nearly identical syntax.
Yeah. As someone who lived that era it was so frustrating that they abandoned ES4. I used AS3 daily for almost a decade until Adobe abandoned ActionScript4 and Flash Next around 2015.
I worked on a web app that used AS3 and Adobe Flex for UI. It’s crazy to think about how powerful that framework was and it was twenty years ago now.
No, it was never right for public facing web sites but it shined making internal admins. HTML5 still hasn’t matched it.
EDIT: turns out Flex still lives on as Apache Royale: https://royale.apache.org/ wish I had an excuse to take it for a spin.
Out of the big 4 involved in typescript, only one was involved with the tc39