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To the down voters: My comment is civil and explannatory. You may not like my sentiments, but down votes are not intended for unpopularity. Not only that, but

by eldude 15y ago

To the down voters: My comment is civil and explannatory. You may not like my sentiments, but down votes are not intended for unpopularity. Not only that, but in this case, my comment serves to reinforce the standards of HN regarding mis-titling of links and it is being downvoted. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

pkulak 15y ago
"a language I have not bothered to learn, nor do I plan to anytime soon" That's why I down voted you. Is a JS compiler beneath you? Fine. Then post about that. Don't try to slip it into a veiled complaint about title accuracy.
- ericflo 15y ago
  His statement is factual, I see no veiled complaint in the text you've quoted.
- sausagefeet 15y ago
  So it is fair to call any library written in C an ASM library? C compiles to ASM (in most implementations) after all...
  - pkulak 15y ago
    Oh, come on. How can you be at all familiar with JS and not be able to figure out what a CoffeeScript snippet is doing? It's not quite the difference between C and assembly.
    - malandrew 15y ago
      That's not the point of his comment. It's labeled javascript when it is actually coffeescript. Call it tower.coffee, not tower.js. If I can't fork and contribute to the project in javascript, but instead have to set up my environment for coffee script to contribute, then it's not javascript. This isn't just about readability and comprehension, it's about contribution as well. If the compiled javascript is bundled in there and I can read it, fair enough. If you can't accept patches and code contributions in javascript, then that's not javascript.
Spyro7 15y ago
I have to apologize. I fat-fingered the down vote when I originally meant to up vote your original comment. I think that my mistaken down vote was the one that initially sent your comment into the gray. This was unfortunate as yours was a remarkably civil post on a subject that can be somewhat controversial at times. I am currently working on two projects written predominantly in CoffeeScript, and I completely agree with your original post. It is a mistake to think of CoffeeScript as simply another Javascript, and it is a mistake to make the assumption that people that are comfortable with Javascript will be comfortable within a CoffeeScript project. CoffeeScript is more than just Javascript with a small sprinkling of syntactic sugar. There is a definite learning curve between Javascript and CoffeeScript. List comprehensions, extended regular expressions, and splats - these are just a few of the things that make up that learning curve. The changes in variable scoping that CoffeeScript makes is another. I think that perhaps the best practice for publishing a CoffeeScript project should probably be to append a .coffee to the name rather than the usual .js. This would go a long way towards eliminating the kind of misunderstanding that you refer to in your OP.
- malandrew 15y ago
  +1 for the idea of calling it tower.coffee instead of tower.js
firefoxman1 15y ago
Your original comment did come across as a bit harsh but it didn't deserve anyone's downvote. I think your stance can be summed up similar to mine: Just because I haven't learned Coffeescript doesn't mean I don't plan to, or at the very least, doesn't mean I am against it. I (like you) would like to see the site's documentation in Vanilla because, after all, both Coffeescripters and Javascripters can read pure Javascript. A side note, am I the only one that has noticed an increase in downvote-readiness here lately?

by eldude 15y ago

pkulak 15y ago

"a language I have not bothered to learn, nor do I plan to anytime soon" That's why I down voted you. Is a JS compiler beneath you? Fine. Then post about that. Don't try to slip it into a veiled complaint about title accuracy.

ericflo 15y ago
His statement is factual, I see no veiled complaint in the text you've quoted.
sausagefeet 15y ago
So it is fair to call any library written in C an ASM library? C compiles to ASM (in most implementations) after all...
- pkulak 15y ago
  Oh, come on. How can you be at all familiar with JS and not be able to figure out what a CoffeeScript snippet is doing? It's not quite the difference between C and assembly.
  - malandrew 15y ago
    That's not the point of his comment. It's labeled javascript when it is actually coffeescript. Call it tower.coffee, not tower.js. If I can't fork and contribute to the project in javascript, but instead have to set up my environment for coffee script to contribute, then it's not javascript. This isn't just about readability and comprehension, it's about contribution as well. If the compiled javascript is bundled in there and I can read it, fair enough. If you can't accept patches and code contributions in javascript, then that's not javascript.

Spyro7 15y ago

I have to apologize. I fat-fingered the down vote when I originally meant to up vote your original comment. I think that my mistaken down vote was the one that initially sent your comment into the gray. This was unfortunate as yours was a remarkably civil post on a subject that can be somewhat controversial at times. I am currently working on two projects written predominantly in CoffeeScript, and I completely agree with your original post. It is a mistake to think of CoffeeScript as simply another Javascript, and it is a mistake to make the assumption that people that are comfortable with Javascript will be comfortable within a CoffeeScript project. CoffeeScript is more than just Javascript with a small sprinkling of syntactic sugar. There is a definite learning curve between Javascript and CoffeeScript. List comprehensions, extended regular expressions, and splats - these are just a few of the things that make up that learning curve. The changes in variable scoping that CoffeeScript makes is another. I think that perhaps the best practice for publishing a CoffeeScript project should probably be to append a .coffee to the name rather than the usual .js. This would go a long way towards eliminating the kind of misunderstanding that you refer to in your OP.

malandrew 15y ago
+1 for the idea of calling it tower.coffee instead of tower.js

firefoxman1 15y ago

Your original comment did come across as a bit harsh but it didn't deserve anyone's downvote. I think your stance can be summed up similar to mine: Just because I haven't learned Coffeescript doesn't mean I don't plan to, or at the very least, doesn't mean I am against it. I (like you) would like to see the site's documentation in Vanilla because, after all, both Coffeescripters and Javascripters can read pure Javascript. A side note, am I the only one that has noticed an increase in downvote-readiness here lately?