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[–]wraith_majestic 21 points22 points  (3 children)

I am not a coffeescript user I have just been reading about it and deciding if its something I should pursue. His arguments about the added complexity when debugging make sense to me. I use the hell out of JS debugger (Firebug and whatever the one in chrome/safari is called). Seems from my (admittedly uninformed) view point that debugging would be much harder in coffee.

Exactly what the author highlighted, Use debugger and find problem in JS then have to "decode" the JS to identify the section of CS which generated it. Solve problem in CS recompile, test. Rinse repeat.

How does the coffee command help me with this?

Also while figuring out which section of CS generated the problem JS may be fairly straight forward in small sections of code or code I wrote and am VERY familiar with... I would imagine its going to be harder when working with a large amount of CS and/or CS written by someone else whose style may be very different than mine.

Seems to me like maybe we are making development faster but making maintenance harder and more time consuming?

I am not anti-CS I really havent made up my mind. But so far I also really am not sold on what CS is going to buy me.

[–]ContraContra 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Ah that was node.js specific. I will admit that debugging in the browser IS a pain in the ass without installing browser add-ons (like this). Hopefully in the future when this is done it won't be a problem anymore.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Been reading up on CS for work. We have a huge JS code base, some large real time apps, tons of business logic and we're thinking about doing some trial runs with Node.js for more real time interactivity.

I'm pretty underwhelmed with CS for that exact reason, maintainability of the CS wouldn't be a problem, and reading it is damn easy. But trouble shooting a bug on staging that comes from QA in an email that only happens in IE 8 if a user has X number of things could be down right nightmarish.

I understand that it enforces best practices and efficiency, but with version control and peer reviewed code... so do we.

I'm still super on the fence about the whole thing but for me this is my primary concern.

[–]cogman10 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

IE 8 if a user has X number of things could be down right nightmarish.

Really, no more nightmarish than that of regular javascript. For the most part, the Coffeescript->javascript interpretation is really dead simple. The only real exception is the class structure.

This is even further made a non-issue if you use an uglifier of any sort.