Understanding TypeScript's Popularity
TypeScript is an overwhelmingly popular extension to the JavaScript programming language, which focuses on adding a type layer on top of existing JavaScript syntax which can be erased without runtime changes to the original JavaScript. People percieve TypeScript as "just the compiler", but it's a better mental model to think of TypeScript as two separate entities: The compiler (aka syntax) and language tools (aka editor integration) - by treating these two systems as separate you have two important perspectives to understand decisions get made.
TypeScript's growth is roughly that the number of downloads doubles every year on npm. Today it's about 20 million downloads a week. Last April it was about 10 million. That growth is consistent, and doesn't seem to be showing any slowing down.
From 2.0 onwards, TypeScript shipped a new release every 2 months. Now it's a bit calmer, there's roughly a month of feature work with a beta, then about 2 months of beta testing and bug fixing. This keeps releases pretty stable and solid.
