Why TypeScript is Becoming the New Internet Explorer of Programming

Remember Internet Explorer? That browser that somehow dominated the web while simultaneously making developers want to scream into the void? Well, buckle up, because we’re living through a similar phenomenon—except this time it’s a programming language, and ironically, it’s actually good. TypeScript has crossed a historic threshold in 2025. In August, it officially dethroned Python to become the most-used programming language on GitHub, with 2.6 million monthly contributors and a staggering 66% year-over-year growth rate. Let that sink in for a moment. A language that didn’t even exist in GitHub’s earliest days has now become the de facto standard for modern development. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: we’re watching TypeScript transform from a best practice into a mandate. And while the irony of a language with “Type” literally in its name becoming less of a choice and more of an inevitability is darkly amusing, the implications are worth examining.

The Rise of the Typed Overlay

To understand how we got here, we need to rewind about a decade. JavaScript ruled the web with an iron fist—or more accurately, with absolutely no type system whatsoever. This meant developers could write const result = "5" + 2 and get a string, or spend six hours debugging why their function received undefined when they swear they passed a value. It was chaos. Beautiful, flexible chaos, but chaos nonetheless. Enter TypeScript in 2012, created by Microsoft as a superset of JavaScript. The pitch was simple: add types to JavaScript without leaving JavaScript. It was niche. It was “extra.” It was the sort of thing you’d see in enterprise projects where bearded architects made flowcharts on whiteboards. Then something shifted. The combination of three forces created the perfect storm: First, frameworks made TypeScript the default. Modern frameworks like Next.js, NuxtJS, and React’s ecosystem began shipping with TypeScript as the out-of-the-box option. Why click “skip TypeScript” when the default project structure already includes it? Inertia is a powerful thing. Second, AI changed everything. With the rise of AI code generation tools like GitHub Copilot and Cursor, suddenly type safety became critical. A 2025 study found that 94% of errors generated by Large Language Models in code are type-related. TypeScript catches these automatically, creating a feedback loop where AI-generated code feels safer and more trustworthy. Developers weren’t just adopting TypeScript; they were adopting it to survive in an AI-augmented workflow. Third, projects are graduating from prototype to production. Whereas five years ago you could hack together a startup in vanilla JavaScript, today’s applications are more complex, need better maintainability, and—crucially—need to inspire confidence when you’re integrating AI-generated code into production systems. TypeScript shifted from “nice to have” to “required for the serious game.” The growth numbers tell the story: TypeScript saw 77.9% year-over-year growth in AI-tagged projects specifically. This isn’t coincidence; it’s causation.

The Internet Explorer Parallel We Never Asked For

Here’s where the IE comparison gets uncomfortable. When Internet Explorer dominated in the 2000s, developers built for IE because that’s what everyone used, not necessarily because it was the best choice. The browser had market dominance, institutional adoption, and ecosystem lock-in. Developers optimized for IE’s quirks. Competing browsers had to emulate IE’s behavior. Sound familiar? TypeScript is now doing something similar—but with a twist. Unlike IE, TypeScript is actually solving a problem. But that doesn’t change the fundamental dynamic: we’re seeing ecosystem consolidation around a single choice. Look at the numbers:

• 43.6% of developers report doing extensive work in TypeScript
• TypeScript and Python combined account for over 5.2 million contributors on GitHub, approximately 3% of all active developers in August 2025
• 80% of newly added software libraries in the past 12 months are concentrated in just six languages—Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, C++, and C# This is ecosystem concentration. And while TypeScript earned its position through merit, the outcome is the same: other languages get marginalized. The “JavaScript versus TypeScript” debate isn’t really a debate anymore—TypeScript won. Dynamic typing became “legacy.” Being flexible became being “not enterprise-ready.”

Why Devs Actually Love It (And They’re Not Wrong)

Before you think I’m just here to rain on TypeScript’s parade, let’s be honest: developers adopted it because it works. There’s a reason it’s not the “Cobol of 2025”—it’s actually solving real problems. Consider this real-world scenario: You’re integrating an AI code generation tool into your team’s workflow. Your backend AI generates a function like this:

function calculateDiscount(price: number, discountPercent: number): number {
  return price * (1 - discountPercent / 100);
}

If you were using plain JavaScript, you wouldn’t catch this until runtime. But with TypeScript:

// TypeScript immediately catches these errors:
const result1 = calculateDiscount("100", 20);  // ERROR: Argument of type 'string' is not assignable to parameter of type 'number'
const result2 = calculateDiscount(100, "20");  // ERROR: Argument of type 'string' is not assignable to parameter of type 'number'
// This works fine:
const result3 = calculateDiscount(100, 20);    // ✓ Returns 80

For developers working with AI-assisted code generation, this is game-changing. Instead of discovering errors in production or through lengthy QA cycles, TypeScript creates an immediate feedback loop. The AI learns (through your usage patterns) what types matter. You gain confidence in AI-generated code faster. Here’s a practical example of how this plays out in a modern codebase:

// Define your data structure clearly
interface UserProfile {
  id: string;
  name: string;
  email: string;
  registrationDate: Date;
  isActive: boolean;
}
// Your API handler with AI assistance
async function getUserProfile(userId: string): Promise<UserProfile> {
  try {
    const response = await fetch(`/api/users/${userId}`);
    if (!response.ok) throw new Error('User not found');
    const data = await response.json();
    // TypeScript ensures the response matches your interface
    const user: UserProfile = {
      id: data.id,
      name: data.name,
      email: data.email,
      registrationDate: new Date(data.registrationDate),
      isActive: data.isActive
    };
    return user;
  } catch (error) {
    console.error('Failed to fetch user profile:', error);
    throw error;
  }
}
// Usage is now type-safe
const user = await getUserProfile('123');
console.log(user.email);  // ✓ TypeScript knows this exists
console.log(user.phone);  // ✗ ERROR: Property 'phone' does not exist

This type of compile-time checking is why frameworks like Next.js increasingly default to TypeScript. It’s not just about having a blog post that says “we use TypeScript.” It’s about reducing bugs, improving developer experience, and creating safeguards in increasingly complex systems.

The Adoption Timeline: How We Got Here

To really understand why TypeScript’s rise feels inevitable now, it helps to visualize the journey:

What’s interesting about this timeline is that TypeScript didn’t become dominant because of a single decision. It was a cascade of small choices—individual developers choosing better tooling, frameworks choosing sensible defaults, companies choosing to adopt AI-assisted development—that collectively created an inevitability. This is how IE happened too. Not through a mandate from above, but through a million individual decisions that compounded.

The Uncomfortable Questions

So here’s where we need to be honest about the “Internet Explorer” comparison: Question 1: Are we building for TypeScript, or are we building in TypeScript? When you choose TypeScript today, are you making an active decision based on your project’s needs, or are you just accepting the default? In my experience reviewing code from dozens of teams, it’s often the latter. TypeScript gets chosen by inertia, then defended through post-hoc rationalization. That’s different from active choice. Question 2: Is our ecosystem narrowing dangerously? The dominance of TypeScript, Python, JavaScript, Java, C++, and C# means that experimental languages struggle to gain traction. We’re optimizing for known quantities rather than exploring new paradigms. Languages with genuinely different approaches to type systems, memory management, or concurrency models get relegated to niche domains. This might mean we’re missing innovative solutions that don’t fit the TypeScript model. Question 3: Are we optimizing for AI compatibility at the expense of human expressiveness? The fact that TypeScript’s growth correlates so strongly with AI adoption isn’t coincidental. But it raises a question: Are we adopting TypeScript because it’s best for us, or because it’s best for our AI tools? There’s a subtle but important distinction. If we’re optimizing for AI-generated code rather than human-written code, we might be making trade-offs that feel wrong years from now. Question 4: What happens to the alternatives? Python is still massively used (and saw 7 percentage points of growth from 2024 to 2025, driven by AI and data science), but it’s no longer the undisputed king of GitHub. Go, Rust, Python, Julia, and other languages are increasingly being used for specific, well-defined purposes rather than as general-purpose development languages. Is this a good thing? Specialization can drive innovation, but it also creates fragmentation.

A Practical Step-by-Step: Evaluating TypeScript for Your Project

Rather than just complaining about TypeScript’s dominance, let’s be practical. If you’re currently debating whether to adopt TypeScript (or you’re stuck with it and wondering if it’s the right call), here’s a framework for evaluation:

Step 1: Assess Your Use Case

// Define your project characteristics
interface ProjectProfile {
  team_size: number;
  codebase_complexity: 'simple' | 'moderate' | 'complex';
  ai_integration: boolean;
  long_term_maintenance: boolean;
  performance_critical: boolean;
  developer_experience_priority: 'high' | 'medium' | 'low';
}
const myProject: ProjectProfile = {
  team_size: 5,
  codebase_complexity: 'complex',
  ai_integration: true,
  long_term_maintenance: true,
  performance_critical: false,
  developer_experience_priority: 'high'
};

Step 2: Calculate Your TypeScript ROI

Ask yourself these questions:

• Team Size Matters: Larger teams benefit more from TypeScript’s self-documenting nature. Solo developers might find it overhead.
• Maintenance Time: If your code lives for years, type safety saves debugging time. Throwaway scripts don’t need it.
• AI Integration: If you’re using Copilot, Cursor, or Claude for code generation, TypeScript is nearly essential.
• Onboarding Friction: New developers need to understand TypeScript’s type system. This is training debt.

Step 3: Migration Strategy (If You Decide to Go)

If you’re moving from JavaScript to TypeScript:

// Step 1: Configure tsconfig.json with forgiving settings
{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "target": "ES2020",
    "module": "ESNext",
    "lib": ["ES2020", "DOM"],
    "jsx": "react-jsx",
    "strict": false,  // Start loose, tighten gradually
    "esModuleInterop": true,
    "skipLibCheck": true,
    "forceConsistentCasingInFileNames": true,
    "declaration": true,
    "declarationMap": true,
    "sourceMap": true,
    "allowJs": true,  // This is key - allows JS and TS to coexist
    "checkJs": false  // Don't check JS files initially
  },
  "include": ["src"],
  "exclude": ["node_modules", "dist"]
}
// Step 2: Rename one file at a time
// old: src/utils.js
// new: src/utils.ts
// Step 3: Start with interface definitions
interface ApiResponse {
  success: boolean;
  data?: unknown;
  error?: string;
}
// Step 4: Gradually increase strictness
// Once you're comfortable, change "strict": true in tsconfig.json

The Real Issue: Consent and Alternatives

The “Internet Explorer moment” we’re in isn’t really about TypeScript being bad. It’s about the illusion of choice collapsing into a fait accompli. Developers younger than 2023 might not have experienced TypeScript as optional. For them, it’s simply how you write JavaScript. Just like IE users in 2007 didn’t remember a time when the browser choice mattered—there simply was IE. And here’s the critical part: that’s not inherently terrible. Standardization can be good. It creates ecosystem investment, shared tooling, interoperability. But it also means:

• Alternative type systems (like those in Python or Go) don’t get the same infrastructure investment
• Experimental languages struggle to build communities
• The “tyranny of the marginal case” sets in: you add features for the majority, and minorities suffer
• Vendor lock-in becomes cultural rather than technical

What Does This Mean Going Forward?

If TypeScript has become our “new IE,” what’s the play? For individuals: Learn TypeScript well enough to be dangerous, but also learn an alternative paradigm (Go for systems programming, Python for data science, Rust for performance). Don’t let TypeScript be your entire toolkit. For teams: Make active choices about when TypeScript is appropriate. Don’t use it because it’s the default; use it because it solves a specific problem you have. If you’re building a quick prototype and TypeScript feels like friction, that’s data. For the ecosystem: Support and use alternative languages. Advocate for language diversity in your hiring and project choices. Don’t let GitHub’s usage stats become a self-fulfilling prophecy where TypeScript’s dominance gets attributed to “everyone wants TypeScript” rather than “everything defaults to TypeScript.” For language designers: Learn from TypeScript’s success. The things that made TypeScript dominant weren’t just technical—they were psychological and infrastructural. Great tooling matters. Good defaults matter. Integration with popular frameworks matters more than the elegance of your type system.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Here’s what keeps me up at night about TypeScript’s dominance: The 2025 Octoverse report mentions that AI-assisted development is driving TypeScript’s adoption. This creates a feedback loop: TypeScript is popular because AI tools work well with it, so frameworks default to it, so AI tools are optimized for it, so TypeScript becomes more popular. It’s self-reinforcing. But it also means we might be optimizing the entire ecosystem for a technology that’s only a few years old. We’re building cultural and infrastructural momentum around AI-assisted development patterns before we fully understand their long-term implications. It’s a bit like building highways before we understand traffic patterns. You create reality through infrastructure, and infrastructure is hard to change.

Conclusion: Living with Inevitability

TypeScript is the new Internet Explorer—in the sense that it’s become the default choice for modern web development, and that default carries both benefits and costs. Unlike IE, it’s actually good at what it does. Unlike IE, it earned its position through genuine merit rather than market dominance. But the lesson remains: when your entire industry standardizes on a single tool, you lose optionality. You gain reliability, but you lose flexibility. You gain ecosystem investment, but you lose diversity. You gain developer productivity—until you don’t, until you hit a wall that TypeScript wasn’t designed for, and you realize you’re stuck. The counter-move isn’t to reject TypeScript. The counter-move is to keep learning other languages, to make deliberate choices rather than accepting defaults, and to remember that dominance in 2025 doesn’t guarantee relevance in 2035. Use TypeScript because it’s right for your project, not because it’s what everyone else uses. Build alternatives that solve problems TypeScript doesn’t. Mentor developers in the full spectrum of languages and paradigms. And maybe, just maybe, we can avoid the 2030s version of “why does this web framework still need IE compatibility?” The choice might be an illusion, but the discussion doesn’t have to be.