A Case Against Using CoffeeScript
There has always been a <i>strong</i> "case against using CoffeeScript", from day one. Like any other new language, it's a new, strange thing to learn, there's new tools and a new compiler, and your team doesn't already know it.<p>In addition, CoffeeScript has it's own distinct burden to bear: the entire point is to compile (in as straightforward a fashion as we can manage) into JavaScript. That you're debugging JavaScript when you run CoffeeScript in production should be no surprise -- that's the point. But it's also quite a large hurdle to jump.<p>What's interesting about CoffeeScript is that despite there being a strong case against using it -- and I try to make the same case in my workplace -- people still find it useful enough, and transparent enough, to use it regardless.<p>As of this morning, CoffeeScript is the 13th most popular language on GitHub, and the second most popular module in npm, after Underscore. All of the top ten languages on GitHub date from the mid-1990s or earlier.<p><a href="https://github.com/languages/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/languages/</a>
<a href="http://search.npmjs.org/" rel="nofollow">http://search.npmjs.org/</a><p>The better question is not "What is the case against using CoffeeScript?" ... but instead: How is it that despite all of the obvious hurdles stacked against a new source-to-source language, people are actually using CoffeeScript?<p>That's the question I'd like to know the answer to.