Comment by camus2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by camus2 | Hacker News Reader

Meh,the OP has basically a "X isnt the answer" article for every language that compiles to JS.

While he makes some valid points. devs are using these languages because a lot of them just dont like javascript, and will never like it.

You cant design a language and expect every developper to agree on these choices, especially when it's the core language of a plateform (web).

So choice is good,nothing is perfect and javascript is far from perfect itself.

Coffeescript is productive and influenced ES6 heavily, Dart has its own ecosystem,Typescript fits people who want compile time type checking. And what language devs choose is nobody's business but theirs.

Front end devs are not interested in writing javascript,they are interested in using web apis and building products. At the end of the day,the user doesnt care about the language,but wether he can run the app in his browser or not.

It's funny the OP use Crockford citations, Coffeescript was an answer to Crockford's book at first place,and D. Crockford loves Coffeescript.

I'm certainly all for choice in development tools and I understand that there are people who like each of these languages. I think it is great that people are experimenting with all these extensions to JavaScript, both because they can inform the future of JavaScript or its successor and because eventually someone will come up with the right mix of features/changes to really supplant JavaScript.

That being said, for the reasons I spelled out I think the current crop of options are really lacking. I get that developers are going to use whatever tool they have to get what they need done, but I don't see why we shouldn't provide them great tools to do their work in.

I'm interested in a source for your statement that "Crockford loves Coffeescript". What I found was http://zhan.renren.com/h5/entry/3602888497994246013 which while very favorable sounds more like my statement that it is good things like this are happening. He concludes "I'm not sure there's enough of a payoff there. But just as an experiment, as a design exercise, I think it's a brilliant piece of work."

   That being said, for the reasons I spelled out 
   I think the current crop of options are really lacking.

then

   Lol, I can't address every single one one

You cant have it both ways.

I'd say to "not the answer": what is your question? If "is it silver bullet," than of course, we know for decades that.

http://faculty.salisbury.edu/~xswang/Research/Papers/SERelat...

Otherwise, TypeScript does solve specific problems and I like it.

And what language devs choose is nobody's business but theirs.

If I were the CTO of a Node-based startup with 10 or more developers, there's no way I'd allow the developers to choose whether they wanted to write their code in CoffeeScript, TypeScript, Dart, or clean JavaScript. Within a company there has to be at least some consistency.

He seems not to have written one for ClojureScript :)

Lol, I can't address every single one https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...

the biggest players right now are

TypeScript CoffeeScript Dart ClojureScript

you got 3 out of the 4 so far

Such things are so subjective, but the sources I read usually only list the first three. I'm not opposed to learning about ClojureScript, but I have to make choices about where to spend my time. At this point, I think I need to focus on addressing JS Linters and what I think an answer would look like. When I write those up, I'd love to hear feedback from someone who knows ClojureScript about how closely (or not) it matches what I would be looking for.

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