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Comment by ganarajpr | Hacker News Reader

I agree completely with this review of the current state of development for atom.

I believe one of the biggest issues today is their choice of going with coffeescript - for everything ( including package development! ). If we want to involve the largest audience possible - then there is no doubt that - people have to go with javascript. They do support ES6 ( using babel ) - but as a pure javascript developer the documentation being in coffeescript means that - I have to go and translate coffeescript documentations to js and then understand how to actually use any particular api.

Having atleast a pure js documentation - would definitely help quite a lot.

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Yeah. If I see Coffeescript I generally tend to feel a bit of reluctance to get involved.

Sometimes I'll translate it into real Javascript but most times I will just pass it on and saying "nevermind". It's just not the "real" thing and something has to be truly great or promising for me to bother with the indirection.

That, and like VBScript, I just don't like Ruby or Python, so I'll stay away from projects using it.

There's a general tide moving towards ES6 in the Atom community, and away from CoffeeScript. See https://github.com/atom-community/environment for an example package. That doesn't mean all existing packages will be rewritten overnight, but it does mean you'll see a shift, even in core packages.

I do not understand the argument that CS is not "the real thing".

JavaScript isn't the real thing either. On the way to the processor there are so many different layers of abstraction to go through. CS is just another one of those layers.

Not to be snarky, but it would probably take you 15 minutes to understand CoffeeScript syntax from coffeescript.org (if you are proficient in Javascript) and you'd be able to read those and any future examples in CS. It will very likely be faster than compiling the CS to JS and trying to understand the API from that.

I believe this was GitHub's justification for it early on. The barrier to reading (but not necessarily writing) CoffeeScript is so low for a JavaScript dev that it's basically non-existent. I'm moving my code towards ES6 and away from CS, but I still honestly prefer reading CS. It's just beautifully succinct.

I could never really get into CS, but because I switched from Sublime Text to Atom, I am thinking of trying to learn it a bit just to hack on my own stuff.

I prefer ES2015 above all subset languages.

I strongly agree with you. Why coffeescript.

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