TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript. It allows for large scale JavaScript application development with features like classes, inheritance, modules, generators, async/await, and decorators. TypeScript introduces strong typing, interfaces, generics, and other design-time features not available in JavaScript to reduce complexity in large codebases. It supports the future of JavaScript by allowing the use of ES6 and ES7 features today through compiler options. Getting started is easy using the TypeScript playground or boilerplate projects on GitHub.