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Announcing CoffeeScript 2

coffeescript.org

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Re: Announcing CoffeeScript 2

#41

Post by ralmidani »

CoffeeScript is still very relevant for me. I have two medium-sized Ember projects written in CoffeeScript (and Emblem and Sass--the original, indented variety, thank you very much).

I have been looking at React (will probably skip due to the patent license) and Vue, but cannot imagine going back to semicolons and (excessive) curly braces and parens.

If you married CoffeeScript just out of convenience (being able to avoid prototypes, bind, etc.), then it no longer serves much of a purpose. But if, like me, you fell in love with CoffeeScript's beauty, then no amount of ES6+ features will make it obsolete (as long as you can also keep using those features directly in CoffeeScript).

Re: Announcing CoffeeScript 2

#42

Post by md224 »

jashkenas wrote: post #28
catacombs wrote: post #14

Jeremy, First off thank you for Underscore, Backbone and CoffeeScript. Your work really has helped me and my development team. This question is a little off topic but one I've been wanting to ask for a long time: Last year you took a year off from The New York Times to ride your motorcycle across the Western Hemisphere. Just recently you were hired back at the paper, doing what it appears to be the same thing in the…

Happy to answer, although this is a bit of a funny forum for it: From a work perspective, it's pretty simple. I quit, and then was rehired to the same position a year later. But The Times' Graphics Desk was super nice about it. We had a handshake agreement that I'd come back when I got back, and they even lent me a laptop to maybe file some travel-ish bits and bobs from along the road. So in that sense, it was partia…

> booze, bribes, women

Kind of curious about the "bribes" part...

Re: Announcing CoffeeScript 2

#43

Post by kibwen »

Never used CoffeeScript in anger, and I don't see it regaining the level of hype it once had, but despite its lack of dominance I think it emphatically suceeded in helping to push Javascript towards its modern (and much improved, IMO) incarnation. A good recent example of how a technology doesn't need to capture marketshare in order to have a positive impact on the market.

Re: Announcing CoffeeScript 2

#44

Post by DiThi »

camus2 wrote: post #27
city41 wrote: post #10

I can't imagine CoffeeScript will see much adoption these days as most people seem to think ES6+ is "good enough". I miss how concise functions are in CoffeeScript and also miss being able to do object literals without the braces. But there's no chance at all in convincing my team to adopt it, as modern JS really is "good enough".

The only reason most people used CS was short hand function declaration and classes, It really made writing javascript easier as dealing explicitly with prototypes is a pain in the ass AND it also eliminated differences between browsers when it came to JS implementation (yes IE8 was still a thing back then). All these things are irrelevant today. 1/ Most of CS features are supported by javascript 2/ ECMASCRIPT spec i…

> The only reason most people used CS was short hand function declaration and classes

And for loops (which double as list comprehensions). And the existential operator. And "this." shorthand. Among other reasons. To my team it's also more clean-looking than Python (which used to be my favourite language), esp. when using a good syntax highlighter like Atom's (or at least that differentiates function calls, like Github's).

Yes, there's not much difference now from ES6 regarding features, but for some of us it's still worth it.

Re: Announcing CoffeeScript 2

#45

Post by kbenson »

madeofpalk wrote: post #30
kbenson wrote: post #12

> So a CoffeeScript => is now output as => Wait, using the arrow function notation doesn't bind this , arguments , super , or new.target [1] in javascript, as opposed to the normal function syntax. Not being a user of coffeescript, did coffeescript not do that already, or did they also throw in code to change that in the generated code? It seem to me it would make sense to map items that match conceptually, not just…

Coffeescript's => binds this. Javascript's => also binds this (more or less) Seems to map fairly well conceptually.

> Javascript's => also binds this (more or less)

Javascript's => doesn't bind this though, and function does, which was my point (and is what the reference I included was saying). That's a specific change in JS, and either coffeescript had code in place to emulate the current behavior in prior versions where they used function(), or they have code in place now to emulate function() now that they're using =>.

I'm going to update my original comment to be a bit more clear on what I was saying.

Re: Announcing CoffeeScript 2

#46

Post by srb- »

As a CoffeeScript fan things were looking pretty bleak a year or two ago. In particular there was zero momentum for new features.

How things have changed! Major kudos to Geoffrey Booth and all involved. Coffee's beautiful syntax combined with async/await has taken a lot of the 'ick' away from coding in JS, at least for me.

Re: Announcing CoffeeScript 2

#47

Post by catacombs »

kristiandupont wrote: post #39
catacombs wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a good point. The NYT is responsible for other awesome tools: d3.js, ai2html, etc. I'm sure if the company has a person who creates a tool that is used all over the world under its watch, they would allow that person to take as much time off as he or she needs. Still, I know people who are --- no pun intended -- the backbone of codebases at their company, and taking a year off and being rehired is out of the…

>What's to stop the company from finding a replacement who can be up to speed with the code in a short amount of time? The fact that it's very, very hard and the competition is fierce? Also, this is not a romantic relationship we're talking about. If you leave your place of work, no matter how irreplaceable you are the company is going to carry on as best they can. If a year later you are available again and they sti…

The competition is fierce for whom? The company picking from a pool of developers, or the developers competing for the job?

If the former, then the company is an advantageous position to pick someone from the pool. It's not like ZERO people will apply for the job.

If you're talking about the latter, then it's irrelevant. I'm mainly focusing on the company.

Re: Announcing CoffeeScript 2

#48

Post by catacombs »

rattray wrote: post #35
santoriv wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't answer for him. but it would seem to me that there is a pretty universal shortage of quality developers, much less superstar developers familiar with your existing codebase. Rehiring him would be a no-brainer.

jashkenas is a graphics editor, not a developer. Your point still stands though.

Graphics editors are also developers if they are writing code to make graphics, i.e. every newspaper's graphics team that has made interactive projects.

Re: Announcing CoffeeScript 2

#49

Post by catacombs »

md224 wrote: post #42
jashkenas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happy to answer, although this is a bit of a funny forum for it: From a work perspective, it's pretty simple. I quit, and then was rehired to the same position a year later. But The Times' Graphics Desk was super nice about it. We had a handshake agreement that I'd come back when I got back, and they even lent me a laptop to maybe file some travel-ish bits and bobs from along the road. So in that sense, it was partia…

> booze, bribes, women Kind of curious about the "bribes" part...

Probably bribes for police, soldiers or any other government official he ran into during his travels.

Re: Announcing CoffeeScript 2

#50

Post by jmcgough »

city41 wrote: post #10

I can't imagine CoffeeScript will see much adoption these days as most people seem to think ES6+ is "good enough". I miss how concise functions are in CoffeeScript and also miss being able to do object literals without the braces. But there's no chance at all in convincing my team to adopt it, as modern JS really is "good enough".

I miss some elements of coffeescript (the existential operator was really cool), but I think in some ways it served its purpose: large parts of it were lifted for use in es6.

These days we have typescript as another option, and I feel like there's more gains from that than the syntactic niceness of coffeescript.

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