Whew, so it's not completely axed. If anything Canada needs significantly more investment and tax programs like this. Brain drain has always been a problem for Canada because of the lack of investment from the government and the lack of tech-oriented VC.
They have $4.2 billion in revenue per quarter, that's huge, and they still have a lot of users. They could easily scale back their ambitions and become very profitable, abandon the playbook, reduce their workforce, move focus to East Asia, and keep milking every cent out of the old-fashioned phones they kept pumping out long after Apple ate their lunch.
If you want to compare that Java-ish syntax to some of the super-slick stuff you can do in NodeJS check out http://www.jaxcore.com/jxss/ which is a JavaScript/CSS hybrid stylesheet format I came up with recently.
It's important to get what you've built into the hands of someone else. You cannot rely on your own experience with what you've built as a basis for decision making.
Self-promotion: at http://www.jaxcore.com I've built a really neat NodeJS application server. And I experiment with ways to use it, including building a new mobile advertising platform.
My Macbook Pro should be powerful enough to run the Siri software. But Apple doesn't let me use it because they only put it on a particular, expensive, smartphone.
What really bothers me about Siri, is how Apple makes it tied to specific hardware. Technologically, there should be no reason why Siri-style actions are not available to every PC, and every smartphone.
Native platforms have been, and still are (thanks to Apple's success), the major roadblock to innovation.
I wouldn't take YC's decision to heart. They have no crystal ball and cannot know if you will ultimately be successful. You should be willing to persue a good idea regardless of your YC application, which I think is largely a crapshoot anyways.
I've been experimenting with using QR codes just to copy/paste text and bookmarks between computers. It's something that sounds simple, but really there aren't any good ways to do that, especially not once you add mobile devices and computers other than your own.
Coffeescript is adding an abstraction level, but all the complexity of JavaScript remains, so while you write Coffeescript, you have to sort of compile it in your head. I could maybe get on board if it went one whole level of abstraction further.
The problem with Coffeescript is if you already know JavaScript, it's completely unreadable. Looking at code like this, I have absolutely no idea what it does:
It doesn't make sense because there are magic variables appearing out of nowhere - @options, @el, append -- what are these? I'd have to study the resulting JavaScript to understand what it's really going to do.
Whew, so it's not completely axed. If anything Canada needs significantly more investment and tax programs like this. Brain drain has always been a problem for Canada because of the lack of investment from the government and the lack of tech-oriented VC.