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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

Is CoffeScript still used much? I used it a bit a few years back when I was more interested in webdev and I liked it a lot, but I haven't really heard anything about it for a while. The only CoffeScript code I've seen lately is when I looked into finding the cause of a bug in a package for Atom several months backend back; I don't think I know of anything besides the Atom ecosystem that uses it nowadays, although I might just not be aware of other projects using it.

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I think that CoffeeScript may have been a victim of its own success, now that ES6 is here and seems to have included many of its best features (e.g. arrow functions). We can also consider CoffeeScript to be the one to prove that "compile-to-JS" languages could succeed, so in that sense it sparked the modern surge of such languages (and, obliquely, perhaps helped justify WASM as well).

It remains very popular amongst Ruby/Rails users, presumably due to less switching overhead between Ruby and CoffeeScript vs JavaScript.

ES6 has provided a lot of the features that people were hoping for in JS, and CoffeeScript doesn't seem to be worth the effort transpiling from anymore. It used to be the game in town for "better" JS, but TypeScript seems to have taken that position firmly.

CoffeScript is endorsed by DHH and so it's more of a first class citizen than JavaScript in Rails. However it's not something you have to use. I never really liked using it and I easily managed to keep using JavaScript in all these years since Rails 3.1. I hope it's going to the deprecation bin soon but I believe that Basecamp is using it a lot. DHH won't have added it to Rails if that was not the case.

It is definitely less popular than it was pre-ES6, but it is still used.

I personally use it at work every day, plus I notice there are quite a few libraries (both open source and closed source) that are obviously compiled from coffeescript.

There is also work being done on a new version, CoffeeScript6, which will compile to ES6 and future ES standards. Check out the discussion at https://github.com/coffeescript6/discuss

ES6 has killed much of CoffeeScript's momentum, because of parity on a lot of language features, but I still find those that don't work with JS everyday still prefer it due to cleaner syntax, and fewer surprises.

i would contest the fewer surprises point. it may be convenient when it's your main language and you deal with it every day, but for somebody that only touches it once in a while it is riddled with quirks and warts. one has to constantly keep mental model of both languages in his head when developing to be productive.

trivial example:

    { a: b
      c: d }

guess what this transpiles to (hint: not an object)

this is about as far from least surprise principle as you can get.

It looks like an object to me: [0]

[0] http://coffeescript.org/#try:%7B%20%22a%22%3A%20%22b%22%2C%2...

http://coffeescript.org/#try:%7B%20a%3A%20b%20%7D - object

http://coffeescript.org/#try:%7B%20a%3A%20b%2C%20c%3A%20d%20... - object

http://coffeescript.org/#try:%7B%20a%3A%20b%0A%20%20c%3A%20d... - bullshit

i understand why this happens, i just think it's a stupid edge case that shouldn't exist. and there are more like that in coffeescript.

Interesting. Not something that's hit me before.

But, I'd still take an edgecase over other JS quirkiness.

I still prefer CoffeeScript because of its clean syntax.

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