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Comment by atomical | Hacker News Reader

Is this where CoffeeScript left off? How would you compare it to CoffeeScript?

Many of the great features of modern js (destructuring, fat arrows, splats) came directly from CoffeeScript. As much as I loved the comparative power of CoffeeScript (list comprehensions, everything is an expression), its time has past. There is very little active development and it has lost all momentum. It also never started addressing the biggest issue facing large JS projects, typing and static analysis. Refactoring a CS project is a fragile process that I won't miss.

This is a late reply, but...

Are you sure CoffeeScript has lost momentum? It now supports ES2015 imports and exports, and I've seen quite a bit of work on the 2.0 branch (and various forks where contributors are adding new work before merging back to 2.0) to add support for extending ES2015 classes. It looks like that PR will be merged soon.

Also, how much momentum does it need? The language is complete and usable as it is.

I write this as someone who does lots of professional work in ES2015, and very little in CoffeeScript. But every time I come across CoffeeScript in a project, I find myself admiring how nice it looks, and realizing how ugly ES2015 looks in comparison.

Fun fact: Javascript was originally intented to have scheme-inspired syntax, until Sun marketing team decided that it should have Java-like syntax (and name). Luckily the semantics survived. So in a sense CoffeeScript respects more the true origins of "javascript" with its everything-is-expression idiom.

Personally, my strongest dislike with ES6 is its afterthought C-like syntax from 40 years ago. Nowadays, hardware is fast enough so that we don't need redundant {()}; hints for quick parsing, instead we should focus on human readability.

I wish there was an editor plugin which enabled alternative syntax (without dividing the community). Syntax is really a reprentational layer thing, just like color theme, and should be personally customizable.

There are many differences. One is that CoffeeScript will always need to be compiled. Code written in, e.g. ES7, will not have to be compiled down with Babel anymore once browsers in the wild all support ES7.

Also, AFAIK CoffeeScript restricts you to using JS features found in ES5.

CoffeeScript is most similar to ES6 but with some slight differences in syntax and style

I have the intuition that the plans of the developers of the future version of JS are that you will always have to transpille the code.

https://youtu.be/3pKNRgResq0

On the other hand, I think that the time of CoffeeScript has passed. It made some sense before Babel but now, IMHO, it is only for Ruby developers who don't like the syntax of JavaScript.

At this point, JavaScript is inching closer and closer to just being assembly language for the web.

I think things will get very interesting indeed once WebAssembly really starts to be a real thing.

And this day maybe we will not need JavaScript anymore... ;)

Literally can't wait for this.

What a way to go.

As a Ruby developer who doesn't like the syntax of JavaScript, Babel and ES6+ have changed my perspective. After the initial hurdle of figuring out what the hell webpack, babel, and npm (now yarn) were doing, I've found Javascript to be outright pleasant to use.

afaik CoffeeScript has no specification

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