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In this specific situation, the conversion was done as part of a Dropbox hackweek. There are almost certainly other projects they could have worked on for that

In this specific situation, the conversion was done as part of a Dropbox hackweek. There are almost certainly other projects they could have worked on for that week that would have resulted in a more tangible business gain for Dropbox as a company, but the point of teamwide hackweeks/hackathons/etc is more employee morale than anything else. It seems to me that it succeeded pretty well at that goal.

MatthewPhillips 14y ago
Rewriting working production code is not something to be done for fun at a hackweek. It's a very serious thing. And since it took a week they had a significant amount of code to rewrite. What new bugs were introduced by the rewrite? Did they open the door to any XSS attacks? Who knows.
- btilly 14y ago
  Did you read the article? A lot of that week was spent testing that there were no regressions in the code, and not actually rewriting. I'd be comfortable that no new attack vectors were opened.
- gfodor 14y ago
  You really seem to be on a crusade to convince people that this was a reckless, short-sighted, waste of time. Clearly these developers are professionals because they went into detail how they prevented regressions. I wouldn't be surprised if they inadvertently fixed a number of bugs due to the fact those bugs are impossible to make in CoffeeScript, or because they filled in gaps in their test coverage. Porting JS code to CoffeeScript is not very hard to do safely. I've done it myself for fairly large pieces of code (not this big.) In this case, it was for a hack week project and was a modest amount of code. It sounds like they got buy-in from the rest of the team that using CoffeeScript is a net win. It sounds like they are moving forward, it was a good decision and use of time, and they are happy with the result. Why do you think you can make arguments that it is in fact not any of these things, when the people who did it are stating otherwise, and the organization is acting otherwise? Why do you think you can make arguments against re-writes that suggest avoiding them because they never ship, when this project has, in fact, shipped, and did so in a week? Either you are missing something, or Dropbox is deluding themselves and are just falling for hype. What do you think is more likely?

MatthewPhillips 14y ago

Rewriting working production code is not something to be done for fun at a hackweek. It's a very serious thing. And since it took a week they had a significant amount of code to rewrite. What new bugs were introduced by the rewrite? Did they open the door to any XSS attacks? Who knows.

btilly 14y ago
Did you read the article? A lot of that week was spent testing that there were no regressions in the code, and not actually rewriting. I'd be comfortable that no new attack vectors were opened.
gfodor 14y ago
You really seem to be on a crusade to convince people that this was a reckless, short-sighted, waste of time. Clearly these developers are professionals because they went into detail how they prevented regressions. I wouldn't be surprised if they inadvertently fixed a number of bugs due to the fact those bugs are impossible to make in CoffeeScript, or because they filled in gaps in their test coverage. Porting JS code to CoffeeScript is not very hard to do safely. I've done it myself for fairly large pieces of code (not this big.) In this case, it was for a hack week project and was a modest amount of code. It sounds like they got buy-in from the rest of the team that using CoffeeScript is a net win. It sounds like they are moving forward, it was a good decision and use of time, and they are happy with the result. Why do you think you can make arguments that it is in fact not any of these things, when the people who did it are stating otherwise, and the organization is acting otherwise? Why do you think you can make arguments against re-writes that suggest avoiding them because they never ship, when this project has, in fact, shipped, and did so in a week? Either you are missing something, or Dropbox is deluding themselves and are just falling for hype. What do you think is more likely?