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> 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?
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.
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...