Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ez77 5540 days ago
Just out of curiosity, do you use CoffeeScript for all your underscore.js and bakckbone.js development?
1 comments
jashkenas 5540 days ago
Nope. Both of those are JavaScript libraries aimed towards widespread adoption by JavaScript users, and therefore aren't written in CoffeeScript.

That said, I did port Underscore.js to CoffeeScript once, and the resulting compiled JS ran (a little bit) faster than the original version.

link
detst 5540 days ago
Why does that stop you from writing them in CoffeeScript, especially if it's faster? Because you want contributions back to the projects from JS-only developers?
link
jashkenas 5540 days ago
Yep. I'm a pragmatist at heart. I don't think that either Underscore.js or Backbone.js would have gotten the same sort of adoption they've seen (eg. github.com/popular/watched) if they had been written in CoffeeScript. Perhaps in a year or two it would be different.
link