First of all, thanks for your answers! It's cool that you're taking the 
time to discuss this.

Being a fully open source project I like to see Polymer as a community 
effort, even if the vast majority of contributions come from the core team. 
I agree that the use of typescript might not affect anyone downstream but I 
think it does significantly raise the barrier of entry for new people 
wanting to contribute. But then maybe that is not necessarily a bad thing.

On Tuesday, May 24, 2016 at 5:06:50 PM UTC-5, rictic wrote:
>
> I second that. For our node-based tools, the decision to go with 
> typescript was very straightforward. Our use of typescript has no impact on 
> anyone downstream, whether they use the tools as libraries or as binaries, 
> as by the time the code is published in npm it's totally normal, legible, 
> commented javascript.
>
> If typescript were to part ways with the standard, then we could migrate 
> off of it with minimal effort. It's purely a labor saving device for those 
> of us that contribute to the tools repos.
>
> I'm more skeptical than Justin of compile-to-javascript languages, but for 
> Typescript the output looks so much like the input that it does not worry 
> me or feel like a departure from the platform.
>
> On Tuesday, May 24, 2016 at 12:08:31 PM UTC-7, Justin Fagnani wrote:
>>
>> Using TypeScript in tool has really helped our development process - from 
>> documentation, refactoring, and code-completion, to the type checking and 
>> errors that compliments our tests. We've been converting our tools projects 
>> to TypeScript for months now, so this is nothing new.
>>
>> There are extremely few downsides that we've experienced in practice. The 
>> TypeScript compiler is so fast that the project is build be the time we 
>> switch tabs to run tests or a command. The main outstanding issue is stack 
>> traces referencing the compiled output, but this hasn't been much of a 
>> hinderance - the output is very similar to the input, and we're going to 
>> look into source map support. I'm not aware what other drawbacks might be 
>> big issues.
>>
>> I personally don't think that the "Use the Platform" philosophy is in 
>> conflict with TypeScript, or many other compile-to-JS languages for that 
>> matter - in node or the web. For tools, we don't run some huge abstraction 
>> over node's processing model, or it's core libraries. On the web, all of 
>> the critical platform features are available as with JS: The entire DOM, 
>> including Custom Elements, Mutation Observer, Custom Events, Shadow DOM, 
>> the CSSOM, and all JS features like classes, Promises, etc. TypeScript 
>> doesn't define it's own object model, and always uses JS features directly.
>>
>> The tools team really needs to maximize it's output, and TypeScript helps 
>> us do that while still targeting Node, which our customers appreciate. so 
>> there's no reservations from us here. In fact, we grow happier with the 
>> decision every day.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>   Justin
>>
>>
>> On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 11:10 AM, Daniel Llewellyn <[email protected]> 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Personally, I am a bit ambivalent towards Typescript.
>>>
>>> On one hand I like the types system helping me during development; but 
>>> on the other, like you, I like to use the language of the platform natively 
>>> to prevent weirdness in machine-written code that is less understandable to 
>>> a human reader. The IO mentions of using the platform rather than 
>>> abstractions also points towards not using Typescript.
>>>
>>> Sent from Nylas N1 <https://nylas.com/n1?ref=n1>, the extensible, open 
>>> source mail client.
>>> On May 24 2016, at 7:06 pm, [email protected] wrote: 
>>>
>>>> I mean nothing against Typescript but after all the talk at I/O about 
>>>> sticking to standards and reducing the amount of necessary tooling, 
>>>> whoever 
>>>> thought this was a good idea? I understand that there are a lot of things 
>>>> that speak for Typescript in general but I haven't seen it used anywhere 
>>>> else in the Polymer ecosystem and I don't understand why the team chose to 
>>>> start using it now. I'm not going to list all the reasons why I think this 
>>>> is a bad idea - I think everybody in the team is aware of the drawbacks - 
>>>> but I'd love to hear the reasoning behind this.
>>>>
>>>> </rant>
>>>>
>>>> Sorry, but I just had to get this out of my system. Really love the 
>>>> work you're doing! Keep it up!
>>>>
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>>

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