When Anders Hejlsberg started work on TypeScript in 2012, he wasn’t dreaming up a new language to compete with JavaScript. He was trying to solve a very real problem: JavaScript had become the backbone of the web, but it didn’t scale well for large, multi-developer codebases. Teams were shipping millions of lines of loosely typed code, and the language offered no help when those systems grew too complex to reason about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What began as a pragmatic fix has since reshaped modern development. In 2025, TypeScript became the most-used language on GitHub, overtaking both JavaScript and Python for the first time. More than a million developers contributed in TypeScript this year alone—a 66% jump, according to Octoverse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I remember thinking,” he says, “maybe we’ll get 25% of the JavaScript community to take an interest—that would be success. But where we are now? I’m floored.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2025, TypeScript became the most-used language on GitHub, surpassing both JavaScript and Python for the first time. According to this year’s Octoverse report<\/a>, more than a million developers began contributing in TypeScript this year alone (a 66% YoY jump). <\/p>\n\n\n\n So, how did a typed superset of JavaScript become the dominant language of the AI era? We sat down with Anders to talk about evolution, performance, and why a language built for better human collaboration is now powering machine-assisted coding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n