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Be sure not to whine, though, when the abstraction leaks and your code breaks.
I wish I could say blog posts like this helped the cause, but my feeling after reading it is just meh. I'm fanatic about CoffeeScript but there will always be a divide between people who are willing to try it and people who won't. Writing blog posts that effectively regurgitate the documentation while being a bit religiously pushy about it just seem kind of counter to the cause.
>> For example, at Posterous, they use [CoffeeScript] but don’t have any real JavaScript engineers.
The OP probably should have ignored it, but sweeping comments implying that Posterous developers aren't JS engineers is bound to get a response.
Javascript for novices? On the contrary, CoffeeScript is Javascript for professionals .
Example: I see a post on HN or in one of my RSS subscriptions about a great new JS library or plugin, only to click through and see a page full of CoffeeScript examples, and the source code is written in CoffeeScript as well. This is not JavaScript. I will not learn CoffeeScript just to decipher your plugin or library and integrate it into my JavaScript project. And no amount of forceful whining on your part will convince me that it's so readable and intuitive and minimal that there is no significant learning curve there.
I don't use CoffeeScript, because Javascript suits me just fine. But I also don't know many developers that slam it or recall an abundance of anti-CoffeeScript articles... For whatever it's worth (shrugs)
My primary issue with CoffeeScript: people that use it insist that it's JavaScript. Example: I see a post on HN or in one of my RSS subscriptions about a great new JS library or plugin, only to click through and see a page full of CoffeeScript examples, and the source code is written in CoffeeScript as well. This is not JavaScript. I will not learn CoffeeScript just to decipher your plugin or library and integrate it…
CoffeeScript syntax is very simple. It takes about a half-hour, at most, to learn using the language overview (http://coffeescript.org/), assuming you know JavaScript. There's also many well-commented examples you can learn from, such as Conway's Game of Life: http://willbailey.name/conway/docs/conway.html
Do you want to integrate a CoffeeScript library into your JS project? Compile it (many CS libs already have a pre-compiled version available) and use it. Hell, if you really don't want to learn CoffeeScript, compile it without minifying, and use the output for reference instead of the CS - it produces more readable JS than some coders I know.
It really is that simple. You don't have to use it - I only use it for large-scale projects - but you shouldn't get annoyed that people use it for their libraries. I don't want to argue this issue much, but I just don't see any difficulty involved here. I'm a terrible, still-learning coder who's still baffled by every Lisp code sample I see, but CS was super easy to grasp. If I can get it, I'm sure you can too :)
posts on coffeescript (and all posts about software) need to be taken in context. This post's context, it seems, is the type of problem where your pain points are, it seems, "javascript: the bad parts". Coffeescript is pretty great at cleaning up the bad parts and if that's your pain point on a daily basis then coffeescript is probably great for your team.
there are other classes of problems where your pain points are different - e.g. layers upon layers of inheritance hierarchies, complexity on top of complexity, bringing feature development pace to a crawl. Teams where all of the grizzled engineers know javascript cold, know the idioms and thus are rarely bit by "javascript: the bad parts". Switching from javascript to coffeescript provides at most a small, incremental improvement to this class of problems. These are the teams that are laughing at the OP. These teams are also a hell of a lot more interested in ClojureScript, because it brings with it a whole new toolbox of idioms to solve problems of complexity.
i think you one could take all the coffeescript blog posts, and sort them into buckets of "loves coffeescript" and "just doesn't care", and these buckets align perfectly with the two categories of problem i described.
Saying "at Posterous, they use it but don’t have any real JavaScript engineers" is ad hominem and uncalled for, but if you squint past his tone, he's saying: there are different kinds of software, and some problems are harder than others, and it ain't one tool fits all.
I wonder where the blow-back is generated from. Personally, and only anecdotal of course, I feel that I have seen a far greater amount of articles extolling the virtues of CoffeeScript than I have seen condemning it. To be honest, that is the only primary source of whatever trace of resentment I feel towards CoffeeScript: I'm just almost bored of hearing about it. ( tongue in cheek ) I don't use CoffeeScript, because…
There isn't one, but apparently the CS users need validation and have decided to take a page out of the GOP's handbook.
Fully agreed. The syntactic sugar saves lots of time in total, and there are few bonuses like for own key, value in hash that also checks `hash.hasOwnProperty(key)`, which is good practice in JavaScript, but really boring to type in almost all `for` statements. I also observed that using longer, more descriptive variable and function names, the difference between Coffee and compiled JS is definitely not an issue in d…
Use _.each, you're done. Pleasure.
My primary issue with CoffeeScript: people that use it insist that it's JavaScript. Example: I see a post on HN or in one of my RSS subscriptions about a great new JS library or plugin, only to click through and see a page full of CoffeeScript examples, and the source code is written in CoffeeScript as well. This is not JavaScript. I will not learn CoffeeScript just to decipher your plugin or library and integrate it…
It is readable. It is intuitive. It is minimal, and it has a small learning curve. CoffeeScript syntax is very simple. It takes about a half-hour, at most, to learn using the language overview ( http://coffeescript.org/ ), assuming you know JavaScript. There's also many well-commented examples you can learn from, such as Conway's Game of Life: http://willbailey.name/conway/docs/conway.html Do you want to integrate a…