Microsoft ❤ Google …
or something like that
OK, maybe the title is a bit misleading but you get the point. Microsoft does not love Google -as far as I can tell- but at least TypeScript does love Angular. And this is really good for the industry!
I’m pretty sure everyone is very familiar with the image above. We all have felt the desperation that follows the announcement of yet another “standard” or “framework” that will fix the web and, once and for all, bring peace to the galaxy… In fact, I bet that at least one new framework experimented its rise and fall while I was writing this 800 words post.
I felt the same way that time when the angular team announced AtScript.
It felt like X-zibit pimpin’ my JavaScript adding a super-set surrounding another super-set. ‘Cause you know, they heard we like super-sets.
It was just too much!
Then, while watching the opening session at ng-conf I saw the light. It was small and not what you’d call bright but it was there: the TypeScript and Angular teams were actively working together and AtScript was going to be retired in favor of a new version of TypeScript on steroids.
Hooray! This is good!
It is really refreshing to see this kind of collaboration between two big players in the Open Source community (yes, I consider Microsoft a big player in the community, have you visited their Github page lately?). This could possibly mean a change in the way and pace we move towards a more collaborative and open web.
I've always hated how a lot of people in this community feel like they are in possession of an absolute truth and everyone that questions it automatically becomes an enemy. The only absolute truth (ironic, huh?) is that there’s no absolute truth. There’s no silver bullet that will solve every problem. There will always be an edge case which will need an specific solution. And more important than that, there will always be a better way of doing something.
If the angular team (as an extension of Google) could accept that adding yet another ingredient to the formula was not a good idea after all and retired it in favor of a more-mature, already-existing Microsoft solution, what’s your excuse to not accept that, sometimes, we all screw up?
Maybe you took some bad design and architectural decisions. That’s OK. But please, accept the fact that you failed and start making it better. Right now!
Do not make the mistake of defending the indefensible just because it seemed like a good idea and you don’t want to accept the fact that this other guy may have a better idea. It just feels like there’s a bunch of talented people out there that won’t accept different points of view and we really need every individual we can get to move forward.
Microsoft has been doing lots of efforts to bring the modern web to the Windows users with IE and the upcoming Project Spartan, Google is constantly pushing the standards of the modern web to their limits and Mozilla is working really hard and was one of the pioneers of the modern web as we know it.
They all have different motivations but they are working together to make the modern, standardized web a real thing.
Every time I see a core contributor complaining about a library/framework/standard I fear that they will run and create another one to fix the obvious faults the first one has. I wonder why instead of doing that we focus on improving the awesome things we already have?
That should be the spirit of the open source: improving as a whole putting every individual effort towards the same direction. It just won’t work if everyone is just pulling in every direction. We really need to stop feeding our egos and start moving forward together.
I know that there’s a long road ahead of us and making this a reality will take some time. I just feel that this Angular/TypeScript thing is one of the clearest examples that it is possible to gather around common ground and start delivering solutions instead of troubles.
What do you think?
Drop me a comment.
Disclaimer: I’m not a native English speaker, so feel free to point out grammatical and/or syntactical errors. Every respectful comment is deeply appreciated.
