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Comment by blitmap | Hacker News Reader

I think it does depend on how familiar the syntax feels to each individual. To me Coffeescript is the right balance. I absolutely love writing Literate Coffeescript. I am _not_ a fan of strictly typed languages but I do hope Coffeescript finds a friendly syntax for gradual typing like TS in the future. I usually prototype in a 'ducky' way and then lock down type expectations when I'm polishing.

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this is totally fair, but these days you are far more likely to find engineers to hire who know JavaScript or Typescript, than Coffeescript. This certainly matters more to larger projects and larger companies.

I can understand that people don't prefer coffeescript, but if someone "knows" JS or TS they could surely use coffeescript if they needed to do so... since we're still calling them "engineers" anyway.

Sure, but if there majority of your customers want a different language? You should probably listen. That's what happened here, and we are way happier for it.

You might even guess that the "old guard" could have been against such a migration. As someone who should have been a member of that, I wasn't a fan of changing... But then got a few rude reminders from debugging coffeescript that didn't mean what I meant to write. At which point I started thinking that maybe everyone else had a point.

Your comment above seemed to refer to constraints in the other direction: "we can't use Lisp because the only coders available to hire only know Java!" The point is, coffeescript and javascript are much more similar than that, especially now that javascript has imperfectly copied some of coffeescript's improvements.

It's not we can't use it, but rather using it for everything would make hiring, onboarding, and retention tougher, as well as maintenance.

Apologies if I have the wrong impression in the earlier post.

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