Up and Running

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>> Mike: And finally, this isn't just a new twist. This isn't just another Atom. One other things that Code aims to be is like the best possible TypeScript to developer experience out there. It is build with TypeScript in mind. And, in particular, we benefit from that as regular JavaScript developers, because TypeScript is a typed superscript of JavaScript.

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So almost all JavaScript is valid TypeScript. And the stuff that is not valid TypeScript, we shouldn't be doing anyway, right? These are things where the things that our code is doing can cause deoptimizations. It can cause problems when the JavaScript Runtime starts to execute it. So it gives us some keen insight into what's going on, the TypeScript compiler.

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One of the things that launched within the last month was OS X now has the ability to create a C# project and to run it. So it has been possible to use something called Mono which is a C# open source, what would you call it, an open source C# runtime that you can develop on a Mac, and you can write a C# program.

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Now with an extension, you can just create C# projects, and you get a developer experience built by Microsoft with a language that was built, you know, by Microsoft. And you can use it on a Mac, and I hope that we will start to see other .NET languages like F# become things that don't require a particular operating system anymore.

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I love to see when companies, especially when they're shepherding a language like that, to open it up and let developers choose whatever environment they want to work on the programs rather than sort of locking people in. One of the things that was evident for me when I started using code is I didn't have to install a whole bunch of plugins or set up a whole bunch of configuration in order to get things working the way I wanted it to.

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And maybe this is just because the defaults are aligned with what I like, but I think that it's more that some of the important stuff that can sorta hide in the background, that comes with the core editor. And it's of benefit to all developers, and so it is tuned very thoughtfully right out of the box.

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And then finally, I get excited every time there's a new launch. You should follow the @code handle on Twitter, if you like. They'll tweet every time a new release lands, and they do one per month. Every time I look at the release notes, it's like it's new exciting stuff.

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The recent stuff that was added this past month, and it was just a couple of days ago of the latest version landed, was the ability to refactor code by right-clicking on, like select one code and refactor and set it to a function. And these are things that I really enjoyed in other programming languages, other environments, but could never get right in JavaScript.

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It would never work as advertised, and this seems to work really well. So, if you're getting an NPM error, make sure you check the version of your current Node, and it should be 8or newer. If you're using a version of Node that's older than 8, there are instructions in the readme for installing something called NVM, and this will let you sort of install a newer version on the side.

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But you want 8. So I'll be running 8.4. I am fairly confident that any version 8 released should work fine.