Hi Thierry, I think you are looking at Typescript from the perspective of the VFP community which is now quite small, and for us to support it would be a huge challenge. However, if MS abandoned Typescript, it would be no problem because Typescript is now an official language at Google.
Speaking of transpilers and so forth, as far as language translations go, VFP is a challenge because it is ambiguous so it defies parsers. Though recently by chance I was working on a project to do with chatbots. I was intrigued because human language is ambiguous, and the chatbot parser did surprisingly well. The chatbot parser (a Typescript engine) could do VFP parsing. However, it is irrelevant because I could never find the time or the funding for a project like that.
On Mon, Oct 9, 2017 at 8:18 PM, Thierry Nivelet tnivelet@foxincloud.com wrote:
Le 07/10/2017 à 22:29, Paul Hemans a écrit :
But even if they decided to stop it someone could pick up the code and go on. With VFP we were simply stuffed. 'Open source' means the source is available.
Well, theorically true, very difficult practically.
As I mentioned earlier, all major contributors are Microsoft employees or close to, and have been working on that project for years, probably full time if you take a close look at the contribution graphs.
Language translaters are a difficult matter that require a strong academic background and daily involvement in the project.
That's why I can't see how 'simple' users could take over the project if Microsoft decided to withdraw.
If you fork the project, your contribution can go into the mainstream releases ONLY if you issue a 'pull request' and if the project manager(s) accept it and merge it into the main branch. If Microsoft removes resource from this project without transferring the lead to someone else, and if no one's forked branch really becomes a leader, there is no real way to gather contributions into a fruitful manner.
You could theoretically imagine to make your fork become a TypeScriptBis with its own release cycle and register it into bower, chocolatey, grunt and the like, however that looks like a ScFi scenario IMO.
Thierry Nivelet FoxInCloud Give your VFP app a second life in the cloud http://foxincloud.com/
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