Yes. If you disabled unions and pointer casts, basically no C code would compile.
porgamrer
joined 3 years ago
It's similar to any tech buzzword. Take "agile" for example. Agile was successfully sold as being a great idea without really being well-defined. Suddenly anyone selling a development methodology had a strong incentive to pitch it as being the real way to do agile development.
In the 90s and 2000s every 10x california tech guru agreed that OO was the future, but apparently none of them actually liked smalltalk. Instead, every new language with a hint of dynamic dispatch suddenly claimed to represent the truest virtues of OO.
There are also people who argue that smalltalk is not true OO. They say that by Alan Kay's own definition the most OO language is Erlang.
I think it's most useful to learn about that history, instead of worrying about people's post-hoc academic definitions.
Game engines had a lot of growth speculation for the past decade. There were a lot of harebrained ideas about how game engine tech could disrupt loads of existing industries and provide the foundations for various new ones. e.g.
- VFX studio offline rendering going to be replaced with modern game engine rendering any day now!
- AR is about to take off and revolutionise every industry at any moment, if only someone can render the overlays!
- The VR metaverse is here, and millennials love renting so much they are going to rent virtual flats and use unity to look at them!
- The military will be desperate to spend their infinite budget on using unity to simulate warzones or something!
- Wow Roblox found an amazing loophole for monetising child labour using a game engine. Let's steal their idea and scale it up!
And so on.
For every idiot idea there is some large R&D team full of poorly-managed developers desperately trying to apply unity's completely unsuitable technology to a problem it can't solve, on the off chance that one of them turns into a money printer. There's also probably a bunch of marketing people, sales people and suits trying to get past regulatory barriers, etc.
Whenever reality hits on one of these hype bubbles, a lot of people get fired. It just happened to VFX, for example.
5 years ago everything was moving to TypeScript. Now everything has moved. Developers are still catching up, but it will be one-way traffic from here.
I'm guessing your manager thinks TypeScript is like CoffeeScript. It is not like CoffeeScript.
Also, TypeScript is only the beginning. In the halls of the tech giants most devs view TypeScript as a sticking plaster until things can be moved to webassembly. It will be a long time until that makes any dent in JS, but it will also be one-way traffic when it does.