Ask HN: What Happened to CoffeeScript?
8 comments
I had the honor/misfortune of inheriting a coffeescript codebase.
Swiftly rewrote the whole thing in JS, to the great relief of everyone who had ever needed to maintain that code.
It was a weird language and deservedly died out
It was a weird language and deservedly died out
It was killed by typescript.
I'd argue that CoffeeScript was dead before Typescript went mainstream, and that JavaScript killed CoffeeScript: or rather, CoffeeScript killed itself.
Many of the features that made CoffeeScript fun and useful were incorporated directly into ES6. The proposals even cited CoffeeScript and borrowed the syntax verbatim or with minor changes. By the time arrow-functions were accepted it was obvious that the cost of transpiling wasn't worth it any more, all that was left was "significant whitespace", which was the most buggy part about CoffeeScript anyway!
Many of the features that made CoffeeScript fun and useful were incorporated directly into ES6. The proposals even cited CoffeeScript and borrowed the syntax verbatim or with minor changes. By the time arrow-functions were accepted it was obvious that the cost of transpiling wasn't worth it any more, all that was left was "significant whitespace", which was the most buggy part about CoffeeScript anyway!
The whole purpose of Typescript is to be an early release of the next version of JS, so everything in TS will eventually be in JavaScript.
I think CoffeeScript died because it didn't offer any real improvement, which TS offers even incrementally (in a single function, for example) without going all-in.
I think CoffeeScript died because it didn't offer any real improvement, which TS offers even incrementally (in a single function, for example) without going all-in.
The most popular piece that used coffeescript was atom and github recently killed it in favour of vscode, written in typescript afaik.
This.
CoffeeScript only offered sugar and ways to avoid some of the quirks of JS, but the real problem is maintaining large projects written in dynamic languages.
CoffeeScript only offered sugar and ways to avoid some of the quirks of JS, but the real problem is maintaining large projects written in dynamic languages.
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But this is front-end tech we're talking about, so who knows - maybe everyone will have to know PineappleScript in two years to do web dev. (Side note, I had to do a few googles to find a joke JS transpiled language that didn't actually exist - that should tell you how bad it is).