CoffeeScript and Progress | Peter Lyons.
This is a great, personal account of one programmer’s enjoyment of CoffeeScript. I must admit that I haven’t had the chance to fully delve into it on a full scale quite yet, but I’m truly itching to.
At first I wasn’t sure what to make of it. There’s still this part of me that sees anything JavaScript as potentially abandonware so I always let it sit for a while and observe it’s adoption and effectiveness.
It’s nearly a useless position, I realize, as if everyone thought the way I did, things like CoffeeScript would never overcome that waiting period, but I digress.
The perks of CoffeeScript seem awesome, and I like that it’s essentially altered this developer’s position on JavaScript and enamored him all at the same time. Great stuff.
Comments
The nerds love it. Just like the nerds love HAML. And SASS. As programmers, they want to be as efficient as possible. The ones I have encountered are ones that didn’t know HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, so they welcomed tools that allowed them to write Ruby (or another language) which in turn would write that stuff for them.
You are smart to wait it out and see how long these things last. Not that CoffeeScript will go away, but I haven’t heard a great argument for it – just as I haven’t heard a great argument for HAML. The fallback excuse I always hear is ‘well, it’s output of code is cleaner than I could write’. My response: learn to write better code. HTML is not hard, why would I need to introduce a middle-man language to write HTML for me. It’s not worth the time or energy, I can continue to write HTML. Again, the people that seem to love this are people that are 1) Nerds, or 2) haven’t written HTML before. This same concept holds true for JavaScript. I don’t feel it advantageous to learn CoffeeScript, when I can write JavaScript. I would rather spend that time learning something new and useful.
Also – when does it end? Are we going to have another language that wraps and writes CoffeeScript for us because people don’t want to learn CoffeeScript? Then it compiles to CoffeeScript, and then to JavaScript? 🙂