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I started reading through these comments expecting a tall wave of negativity, and was surprised to see such a warm wash of mixed and fond memories from the "bad

I started reading through these comments expecting a tall wave of negativity, and was surprised to see such a warm wash of mixed and fond memories from the "bad old days" when ES3 and IE ruled the roost. Full disclosure: I haven’t used it myself much since ~2012 or so, and modern JavaScript now contains many of the most important features that CoffeeScript offered at the time .... Although they did screw some things up (IMHO): null-vs-undefined in default arguments, super as a parent reference instead of a direct function call, optional parens for single-arguments arrow functions (Prettier agrees!), no shared semantics between arrow and normal functions, that class syntax only supports methods and not data as properties, and so on... When all is done and dusted, I hope that CoffeeScript can be looked back on with affection as a little experiment that showed surprising vigor, one that — with no corporate backing and zero financial support — spread by word of mouth through the web community of the early 2010s, and helped fuel the fire to get JavaScript moving and evolving as a language again. As a side note — and I write this without bitterness — I do find it a bit strange that extremely well-resourced companies like Dropbox, GitHub, CircleCI, Trello, Airbnb (and many, many more) would write so many hundreds and hundreds of thousands of lines of CoffeeScript without ever attempting to contribute changes or fix the issues that they wanted to fix. It’s open source! They probably would have been able to quickly and cheaply make most of the changes they wanted. Anyhow, cheers for the blast from the past!

victorvation 6y ago
Thank you as well Jeremy, for helping us realize how useful JS could be with a proper stdlib in underscore, or how JS could be evolved with Coffeescript. Part of the magic of JS in those days was observing how one OSS project (see: underscore, async, Q, Backbone, Node, Babel, Browserify, etc) could have such a profound impact on the JavaScript ecosystem.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jessaustin 6y ago
Thank you so much for CoffeeScript. I find it an ongoing pleasure to use.
preommr 6y ago
> As a side note — and I write this without bitterness — I do find it a bit strange that extremely well-resourced companies like Dropbox, GitHub, CircleCI, Trello, Airbnb (and many, many more) would write so many hundreds and hundreds of thousands of lines of CoffeeScript without ever attempting to contribute changes or fix the issues that they wanted to fix. It’s open source! They probably would have been able to quickly and cheaply make most of the changes they wanted. This is the heart of a really important issue in OSS that affects everything good and bad about the scene. There are companies that pretty much waste millions on poorly managed projects but won't donate the few thousand needed to make a lot of OSS projects succeed while still using the software. It doesn't help that a lot of the culture just accepts fragile dependencies (who cares if this semi-crucial dependency is managed by the equivalent of newman from jurrasic park), and that a lot of the biggest OSS projects are usually made by people working at some big company. Maybe copyleft licenses would've prevented some of these issues, but I am not sure individual users like those restrictions even if, in some ways, it would benefit the community as a whole. Its absolutely disgraceful how little financial support some really commonly used libraries get.
- dccoolgai 6y ago
  And "they don't contribute" is one of the _less_ harmful things. Look at what Amazon did to Elastic/search.
  - wlll 6y ago
    What did Amazon do to Elasticsearch?
    - dccoolgai 6y ago
      Took Elastic's product (Elasticsearch), forked it and started selling it under the same name. It's a cautionary tale for anyone thinking about running a business based on OSS. https://www.google.com/amp/s/searchaws.techtarget.com/news/252471650/AWS-faces-Elasticsearch-lawsuit-for-trademark-infringement%3famp=1 https://www.google.com/amp/s/searchaws.techtarget.com/news/2...
_puk 6y ago
Reading this, I was intending to say that Jeremy Ashkenas should be publicly lauded for efforts in driving JavaScript forward. Then I saw your username. Not to gush, but the profound difference Backbone, Underscore, and CoffeeScript have made to modern JavaScript development cannot be understated. Thanks for all your efforts. They were exciting times indeed.
ttty 6y ago
I never bought into anything that goes far away from ecmascript. You need to think that any time you distance yourself from the real code, you make a compromise. Coffescript has very little improvements at a cost (different syntax) With typescript, it's also a compromise, but the benefit you get it's really good, types. That's why moving to typescript makes sense, while coffescript not so much.
- brlewis 6y ago
  The post you're replying to isn't trying to get you to move to Coffeescript today. It's saying Coffeescript "helped fuel the fire to get JavaScript moving and evolving as a language again."
studentik 6y ago
Thank you so much for CoffeeScript! I bet on CoffeeScript in 2016 and surely would bet again in 2020, it is still great for those who want to focus on compact and clear coding. Your creation helped unknown developers like myself to actually find frontend coding bearable. After seeing video with you talking about CoffeeScript design aspects ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DspYurD75Ns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DspYurD75Ns ), it was clear that CoffeeScript was created by genius. I think the explanation why big corps did not contribute to your work is simple: they just could not. CoffeeScript was perfect from the start. It was ahead of time when it appeared and now it is still ahead of time for features you mention. It is like SQL or functional programming or algebra. Often best tool to get things done, but not for everyone. If you ever read this, may I please ask one question? Imagine universe where all software is commercial. How much would CoffeeScript cost to its users?
nojvek 6y ago
I was a big fan of coffescript, it was way better than what ES3 offered. I did a small startup where everything was coffee, frontend and node backend. The biggest issue was a little spacing between things would change meaning of program and things could go wrong. I lost some early customers because of reliability. That was a hard lesson and I learn the value of static typing. Typescript is way more verbose but the lesson is you’re writing code so other people can use and improve it. That could also be future you. Dropdown and squiggly driven development that vscode offers is unbeatable as dev experience. But coffeescript, like actionscript (Flash) has a special place in my heart. They were the big ideas back then. Thank you jashkenas.

victorvation 6y ago

Thank you as well Jeremy, for helping us realize how useful JS could be with a proper stdlib in underscore, or how JS could be evolved with Coffeescript. Part of the magic of JS in those days was observing how one OSS project (see: underscore, async, Q, Backbone, Node, Babel, Browserify, etc) could have such a profound impact on the JavaScript ecosystem.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jessaustin 6y ago

Thank you so much for CoffeeScript. I find it an ongoing pleasure to use.

preommr 6y ago

> As a side note — and I write this without bitterness — I do find it a bit strange that extremely well-resourced companies like Dropbox, GitHub, CircleCI, Trello, Airbnb (and many, many more) would write so many hundreds and hundreds of thousands of lines of CoffeeScript without ever attempting to contribute changes or fix the issues that they wanted to fix. It’s open source! They probably would have been able to quickly and cheaply make most of the changes they wanted. This is the heart of a really important issue in OSS that affects everything good and bad about the scene. There are companies that pretty much waste millions on poorly managed projects but won't donate the few thousand needed to make a lot of OSS projects succeed while still using the software. It doesn't help that a lot of the culture just accepts fragile dependencies (who cares if this semi-crucial dependency is managed by the equivalent of newman from jurrasic park), and that a lot of the biggest OSS projects are usually made by people working at some big company. Maybe copyleft licenses would've prevented some of these issues, but I am not sure individual users like those restrictions even if, in some ways, it would benefit the community as a whole. Its absolutely disgraceful how little financial support some really commonly used libraries get.

dccoolgai 6y ago
And "they don't contribute" is one of the _less_ harmful things. Look at what Amazon did to Elastic/search.
- wlll 6y ago
  What did Amazon do to Elasticsearch?
  - dccoolgai 6y ago
    Took Elastic's product (Elasticsearch), forked it and started selling it under the same name. It's a cautionary tale for anyone thinking about running a business based on OSS. https://www.google.com/amp/s/searchaws.techtarget.com/news/252471650/AWS-faces-Elasticsearch-lawsuit-for-trademark-infringement%3famp=1 https://www.google.com/amp/s/searchaws.techtarget.com/news/2...

_puk 6y ago

Reading this, I was intending to say that Jeremy Ashkenas should be publicly lauded for efforts in driving JavaScript forward. Then I saw your username. Not to gush, but the profound difference Backbone, Underscore, and CoffeeScript have made to modern JavaScript development cannot be understated. Thanks for all your efforts. They were exciting times indeed.

ttty 6y ago

I never bought into anything that goes far away from ecmascript. You need to think that any time you distance yourself from the real code, you make a compromise. Coffescript has very little improvements at a cost (different syntax) With typescript, it's also a compromise, but the benefit you get it's really good, types. That's why moving to typescript makes sense, while coffescript not so much.

brlewis 6y ago
The post you're replying to isn't trying to get you to move to Coffeescript today. It's saying Coffeescript "helped fuel the fire to get JavaScript moving and evolving as a language again."

studentik 6y ago

Thank you so much for CoffeeScript! I bet on CoffeeScript in 2016 and surely would bet again in 2020, it is still great for those who want to focus on compact and clear coding. Your creation helped unknown developers like myself to actually find frontend coding bearable. After seeing video with you talking about CoffeeScript design aspects ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DspYurD75Ns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DspYurD75Ns ), it was clear that CoffeeScript was created by genius. I think the explanation why big corps did not contribute to your work is simple: they just could not. CoffeeScript was perfect from the start. It was ahead of time when it appeared and now it is still ahead of time for features you mention. It is like SQL or functional programming or algebra. Often best tool to get things done, but not for everyone. If you ever read this, may I please ask one question? Imagine universe where all software is commercial. How much would CoffeeScript cost to its users?

nojvek 6y ago

I was a big fan of coffescript, it was way better than what ES3 offered. I did a small startup where everything was coffee, frontend and node backend. The biggest issue was a little spacing between things would change meaning of program and things could go wrong. I lost some early customers because of reliability. That was a hard lesson and I learn the value of static typing. Typescript is way more verbose but the lesson is you’re writing code so other people can use and improve it. That could also be future you. Dropdown and squiggly driven development that vscode offers is unbeatable as dev experience. But coffeescript, like actionscript (Flash) has a special place in my heart. They were the big ideas back then. Thank you jashkenas.