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Comment by oaiey | Hacker News Reader

I am not. CoffeeScript was never as popular as Typescript already is. TypeScript is a tool which solves a problem, CoffeScript is a language (IMHO) no one needed.

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To be fair to CoffeeScript, it introduced and popularized features that eventually made it to the EcmaScript standard. You could make a case for it being the kick that started the wave of improvements to JS that we've seen in the past decade.

As for GP's post, I can only hope that Typescript leaves a similar legacy, even if the language itself ceases to exist.

That kind of historical retrospective is an article I would definitely read. As much as Coffeescript seems like a dying language when compared to where JS is today, its appeal was very strong for it to have become a default include in Rails 3.1, and to have been the primary choice for teams like Dropbox and Github [0].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoffeeScript#Adoption

I'm pretty sure Jeremy Ashkenas has commented before on how he's satisfied with the role CoffeeScript ended up playing. Don't know if there are full-fledged articles on the topic, and I can't tag him here, but if you're really curious you can always reach out at https://twitter.com/jashkenas!

Its syntax and design was very appealing to Ruby developers. I was more surprised when Fog Creek chose it for Trello in '12, but yeah back then the raw Javascript experience was fairly poor, and Typescript would still take a couple of years to be ready for production.

CoffeeScript was born out of frustration with JavaScript’s (then major) shortcomings compared to back-end languages like Ruby and Python.

Try building an app in ES3 JavaScript (i.e. it has to support IE7 with no transpiling) if you haven’t before. It can be rather frustrating if you’re used to modern features.

Prototype.js was the kick that eventually led to the standard library updates in ES5, and (as another post has said) CoffeeScript was the kick that eventually led to language- and syntax-level updates in subsequent versions.

Babel can transpile typescript now and strip the types off. So I think it's pretty easy to back out of you ever need to.

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