Completely unrelated to the issue at hand... I had no idea Atom was written in CoffeeScript. I thought it was written in Javascript, which made me positive at the thought of hacking into it.<p>But this code? Definitely giving me a headache, and my interest went down to zero. There seems to be a meme and unchallenged <i>claim</i> in hacker circles that CoffeeScript is somehow more &quot;readable&quot; and easier to understand.<p>Allow me to disagree, and I suspect there&#x27;s quite a few like me. This code is harder to read. I <i>think</i> I understand what the code does, but I can no longer be certain about the language semantics. That introduces needless uncertainty.<p>And it just broke all my pre-configured and pre-setup JS-tooling. Can&#x27;t use any of that for this codebase. Just great.<p>So what&#x27;s up with people writing applications and projects in NodeJS, a prime JS-environment which supports &quot;all&quot; modern Ecmascript-features, classes included, and then decide to go use a non-standard language for their app?<p>And for what gains? How did Coffeescript make this code more readable or easier to debug? It didn&#x27;t. And now you need to debug code compiled from the actual code you wrote. How does that do anything except make everything harder?<p>TLDR: CoffeeScript seems like a bad choice for just about everything and I can&#x27;t see why any big project with a desire for contributors would even consider using it.