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Comment by picks_at_nits | Hacker News Reader

> It's also a kick in the gut to efforts to fix the shortcomings of ECMAScript like ES6 [1].

irony alert: Brendan Eich has said publicly that CoffeeScript was the impetus for several of the features that made it into ES-6, like fat arrows.

Without CoffeeScript, lots of people wouldn’t have known that they wanted some of the things that are in ES-6.

As it is, you don’t need CoffeeScript to develop for Atom. Which is part of the beauty of CoffeeScript. It’s interoperable with what you’re doing today.

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  irony alert: Brendan Eich has said publicly that CoffeeScript was the impetus for several of the features that made it into ES-6, like fat arrows.

ES6 is a real specification supported by JavaScript engines.

  As it is, you don’t need CoffeeScript to develop for Atom. Which is part of the beauty of CoffeeScript. It’s interoperable with what you’re doing today.

The core of the Open Source project is in CoffeeScript.

Let's say the community had their way, and Atom was rewritten in JS well.

There's still a JS/V8/Chrome for a dependency. On an application where we're rendering huge walls of text - we forgo native redraw. Crucial to response time.

It's fun and time-saving for core developers to forgo the grueling work of portable, native, fast code.

But who pays the cost for the shortcuts?

> The thing that turned me away from Atom and its' development is CoffeeScript.

...

> There's still a JS/V8/Chrome for a dependency. On an application where we're rendering huge walls of text - we forgo native redraw. Crucial to response time. > What makes Atom a viable choice when there already is free, open source, native, cross-platform editors with great plugin ecosystems?

I guess maybe CoffeeScript isn't what turned you away?

As a node developer, seeing any official, open source package in CoffeeScript is a red flag.

The sibling I made a link to a thread about CS in Atom. The creator of express.js has his take:

"Hell I had to rewrite a coffeescript driver this week because I can't have our company relying on things written by people who are unfamiliar with javascript, throwing strings, super awkward apis, lots of indirection, and stepping through the compiled source is a nightmare. It's not like I didn't want to contribute, I even tried for a while, but it's just not worth the hell, it was quicker to just rewrite the thing. Not to say all coffeescript libraries are written poorly, but regardless you're really not gaining much, just losing a lot." [1]

If you write an open source application in CoffeeScript, you're not doing the community a favor, you're doing yourself a favor. They pay the penalty.

[1] https://discuss.atom.io/t/why-coffeescript/131/8

FWIW, that same creator created Jade and Stylus which are pythonic like CoffeeScript. What's wrong with HTML and CSS? I could never take his stance against CoffeeScript seriously.

I can't speak for him. I've had fellow programmers love CoffeeScript for their own personal / client projects - but they conceded that for the real deal - a public open source project should stay in JS. Otherwise, it'd scare off swaths of top tier JS coders from contributing. Atom serves as an example of this practice [1].

The smell CoffeeScript in core gives off to them - while I don't subscribe to this - is that "it's an amateur job, don't bother". You don't write open, core code in an abstracted language. That's so suspect. Personal / internal projects are OK, a few I save CS specifically for those situations.

If you look at the source of Express.js, you can see the javascript has it's own aesthetics to it. You can think of express/connect as serving exemplary of node.js code, for now.

On a topic of the CoffeeScript creator, Jeremy Ashkenas also created Backbone and Underscore. These are pretty much examples of top tier JS in the browser. The projects are known for their annotated source:

- http://underscorejs.org/docs/underscore.html

- http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/docs/backbone.html

You can't output this kind of code with CoffeeScript. You have to let in sink in and understand the patterns (the way .extend works in underscore and how Backbone builds upon the idea to add it to objects.)

[1] https://discuss.atom.io/t/goodbye-atom-some-feedback/12301/3...

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