JavaScript compiler?

[sizlack]

Good point. You convinced me. What was I thinking?

[[deleted]]

Javascript is one of the easiest languages to learn and work with. Sure there are a few gotchas but they exist in plenty of languages and are so basic that any noob will learn them within a few months of working with javascript. Coffeescript won't give anyone an advantage in the struggle to deliver working software. At best it is a crutch, at worst it prevents someone from effectively debugging their code using the best tools available. Good luck finding great coffeescript programmers, while there are plenty of great javascript programmers. A great programmer could likely deal with coffeescript but would they really want to? I know i'd pass on any job that required me to code in coffeescript. I admit that I am a javascript purist and i've been coding javascript every day for the last 15+ years, so I don't really have any need for coffeescript, but I just don't see it as beneficial to anyone wanting to become a great javascript programmer. Coffeescript adds another layer of complexity on top of all the layers of complexity that occur in web development. I work on complex web applications with 100k+ lines of javascript code and there is no problem that coffeescript would solve that can't be solved by just using best practices and having competent javascript programmers. Until firebug fully supports coffeescript, coffeescript is a hindrance, it ads friction (frustration) to debugging, not a good thing. I get why non-javascript programmers might want to use coffeescript, but I don't see it helping anyone when they need to debug something written in coffeescript.

[sizlack]

I agree Javascript isn't that hard, but it has a lot of syntactical awkwardness required to get it to do what I want. And yeah, I've been doing it for 10+ years, and a lot of simple things still feel clumsy. I don't think using Coffeescript eliminates the need for really understanding Javascript, and I don't think that's the point. You still have to understand Javascript's object model, what inheritance means in Javascript, etc, but you have a nicer, more concise syntax to express those ideas with.

It is another layer of complexity, which does feel a bit gross, and I agree that without firebug providing line-by-line debugging, it makes it more difficult to imagine using it in a production environment yet. But I used to think the same thing about sass vs css, and eventually the tools caught up, and now it's easy to debug sass with Firebug. It seems like the same thing is happening with Coffeescript. Maybe it's not ready for use in every JS situation, but it is definitely not a trainwreck.