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Comment by h2s | Hacker News Reader

It's because incorporating any open source product into your own project means you will need to read and/or modify its source code eventually. I work around deficient documentation by reading source code several times every day. And eventually you're gonna need to report or fix a bug, or in the best-case scenario add a feature yourself.

The sensible answer to this is "just learn CoffeeScript, then". I guess a lot of people don't want to, for whatever reason. Personally, I know I'm still a bit skeptical of the whole affair myself. The alternative to reading and learning CoffeeScript would be reading compiled JavaScript code. As somebody who occasionally works on something that compiles JavaScript, I know from experience that reading that stuff isn't very fun either!

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> The sensible answer to this is "just learn CoffeeScript, then".

No, the sensible answer to this is "just read the compiled JavaScript". CoffeeScript compiles down to very nice, readable JS. I would even go so far as to say that compiled CoffeeScript is easier to read than 90% of the JavaScript you'd typically find in a open-source project.

I suppose this makes sense. In my experience, overwhelming majority of people using open source software never read the code. Some minority of people do read the code (but in that case, they'd be reading Javascript because that's how we ship the driver). A small proportion of the people reading the code actually end up modifying it themselves, and this admittedly is a problem (though I find Coffeescript so easy to pick up, I don't think it's a serious barrier for anyone who really wants to make changes).

Not that it's really an issue here because Coffescript is basically Javascript anyway, but legible source is important even for developers who don't end up reading it.

The people who actually read the code are a small subset of the group that depends on being able to read the code if necessary. I haven't needed to dive into the source for everything I've integrated into a product because of inadequate API documentation or bugs, but it happens, and it's not something you can generally tell ahead of time.

I'm trying to see what's offensive about learning CoffeeScript, or at least enough to read it? It's a 20 minute challenge at most, and at the end you've learned something.

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