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Comment by r0s | Hacker News Reader

> They break almost all of the tooling that exists for JavaScript debugging.

I just don't see the utility of pre-processors for JS or CSS. I know I'm in the minority here, are developers really working without debugging? I can't wrap my head around that workflow.

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I code in CoffeeScript a fair bit, and I don't find it's that bad even without source maps[0] because of the similarity between CS source and JS output. I can put in debugger statements and breakpoints just as I would in vanilla JS.

[0]: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/source...

this, the notion that CoffeeScript generated code resembles some kind of arcane binary like output is wrong. As knowing the basics of JavaScript is pretty much a requirement for working with CoffeScript I never ever encountered any problems when debugging generated code because is not obfuscated and easy to read and the compiler doesn't do anything you didn't specifically write in your CoffeeScript. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that I think compiled CoffeeScript is easier to read then most peoples hand written JS. What makes code unreadable is the Closure compiler which is completely different beast.

>I just don't see the utility of pre-processors for JS or CSS.

I'm not sure how CSS comes into the discussion, it isn't executed, and thus isn't debugged. And things like SASS and LESS are fairly simple, straightforward pre-processors.

>I know I'm in the minority here, are developers really working without debugging?

I don't think so. You couldn't pay me enough to write javascript. But I have to end up with some javascript because browsers don't support anything reasonable. So I use a haskell -> javascript compiler. I still have to read javascript to debug what is going wrong, but at least I don't have to write it.

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