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Comment by animalgonzales | Hacker News Reader

wtf they want people who know coffeescript https://bubble.io/job?jid=4377554002

Ah yes, one of the many languages where designers were like "you know what sucks about writing code? All that damn punctuation you write! It takes so long to type those curly braces. We're going to make a language where all our punctuation is invisible! Our code will be so much cleaner when all these important control-flow and context-determining marks are unable to be seen anymore!"

Looking at you, Python, YAML, and Coffeescript.

I'll have you know that CoffeeScript is still widely used! \s

cries in legacy code

I'm right there with ya cries in not even Coffee version 2.

One day maybe it'll be a lucrative niche for contractor legacy-maintenance warriors.

That'll happen before I convince senior management that startups with React and Typescript can run rings around us, and that I can't find anyone fulltime who wants to work on our stack (or has even worked in not-React)...

If anyone wants to chime in with their stories about using Decaffeinate, I'd be interested!

https://github.com/decaffeinate/decaffeinate

Got any stories about Coffeescript’s scope? I always suspected the way it works would cause more than a few fires.

Dropbox has a fairly exhaustive post about moving away from Coffeescript that involves decaffeinate: https://dropbox.tech/frontend/the-great-coffeescript-to-type....

I do hope for their own sake that Bubble looks at migrating away. At scale an untyped de facto abandoned 'language' is going to catch up to them sooner or later and limit their ability to iterate safely at scale.

[Disclaimer: used to work at Dropbox, but had no involvement in this project other than massive appreciation for the amount of effort involved]

> I do hope for their own sake that Bubble looks at migrating away. At scale an untyped de facto abandoned 'language' is going to catch up to them sooner or later and limit their ability to iterate safely at scale.

Looks like they founded in 2012, which is right on time for Coffeescript. So, there's a good chance it's not just Coffee - could well be Backbone, jQuery, Handlebars etc all mixed in there, too. You can definitely work React into a codebase like that (we have) but that could be a ton of work to get away from. Those codebases often ended up as un-unit-tested spaghetti.

Codebases from that era are a tech-debt albatross. Sure, you can make them work, but at some point something's going to come along built with modern tooling and just move so much faster.

Pretty ~easy~ legacy codebase migration gig if you're into that kinda work

Warriors would be a good name for anyone working on legacy code like that.

Coffeescript already had a lot of the features we use in es6, and one can argue it’s terser. What’s the misery about? Sounds like you guys were ahead of the curve.

tell me you’re a startup from 2012 without telling me you’re a startup from 2012

It's actually a really nice language. But yes, it was a fad that is mostly irrelevant now...

I still use it daily since I find it so much easier to write and read than having my code littered with semicolons and braces, and it enforces correct whitespace. I do see its limitations, and I wish efforts to marry Coffeescript with Typescript would be more serious.

It's really not. Coffeescript might be nice with fresh development and a small codebase but it's really bad when you're trying to figure out someone else's code.

That can be said of any loosely typed language. I agree that, overall, I'd always prefer something like TS or Java.

> AWS Postgres Redis Node Coffee-Script ES6

The rest of the stack looks good but yeah wtf indeed

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