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I'm curious if your opinion on this would change if they made it so the browser could run Coffescript natively. Personally, I think the fact that it compiles t

I'm curious if your opinion on this would change if they made it so the browser could run Coffescript natively. Personally, I think the fact that it compiles to an intermediate language to be irrelevant to whether Coffeescript should be considered a language. I consider it a different language if for no other reason than, if a programmer familiar only with Javascript looked at code written in Coffeescript, they would not understand it at all. And it can't be converted to Javascript without either considerable hand work, or via an automated tool.

raganwald 15y ago
If this “running natively in the browser” did not involve 100% cross-compatibility with existing JavaScript code, you might be moving up from jargon to a dialect. But as long as the underlying model is the same, and as long as it’s a leaky abstraction, I don’t think of it as a separate language. For example, if it were to be a separate language I would look for its OOP stuff to be implemented in the “engine” and not to be strongly related to the JavaScript prototype mechanism.