[Retozi]

Ex-Coffeescript ,now Javascript with lot's of Python experience guy here.

The "I understand CS code much quicker" argument is a valid one theoretically, but In my opinion, it does not hold up practically that well.

CS got one thing wrong that Python got right: There are many ways to do things.

When writing CS, I understood MY CS just fine... but it always took me longer to understand the CS of other people. Sometimes even longer than JS. This is such a huge drawback, and even if there is coffeelint, for teams, this is deadly.

A lot of devs need to read a fair amount of foreign code. Even worse a lot of coffeescript writers also need to read and understand a lot of JS code.

Understanding and reading YOUR code slightly faster gets mitigated by having longer to understand foreign code.

While some JS purists fail to see that Coffeescript has some benefits, CS people also underestimate how "quickly" you can understand JS code, if you're experienced. It's all about what your brain is trained to do.

In my opinion, with ES6, I would argue for most people (ceteris paribus) it just makes sense to read and write JS exlusively, if you want to maximize output-productivity of a full, practical project.

Shaving off a couple of seconds "understand-time" of your personal, well written CS vs well written JS will just not compensate other things that will take you longer to do with CS.

[rapind]

As an example that I deal with daily, writing React components in CoffeeScript v.s. Javascript really highlights the elegance of CoffeeScript.

Of course you can reduce the JS verbosity with JSX instead... which again is introducing a pre-processor to the mix (one I personally am not a fan of, but w/e).

ES6 adds some sweet stuff for sure, but IMO it doesn't make JS a pleasure to work with yet (which seems to be the argument?).

I'm willing to bet it's not going to reduce the count in this list by much. https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/list-of-langu...

I'm comfortable writing either as I'm sure many are, but when given the choice I opt for CoffeeScript.

P.S. Good luck telling someone using ClojureScript that they should switch back to Javascript.

[colin_jack]

"it doesn't make JS a pleasure to work with yet (which seems to be the argument?)"

My interpretation of what Retozi is saying is that CS just means that in addition to understanding JS, including ES6, you need to be familiar with all the different ways things can be done in CS.

I tend to agree, especially as JS is becoming an improving with each release.

What I'd like to see going forward is JS continuing to add selective sugar as is in CS, but also add functionality that makes going into a new fresh JS codebase and making sense of it easier. That side of things is less about CS, and more about the sorts of ideas you see in Dart and TypeScript.

[rapind]

My experience is the exact opposite. I find that CS removes a lot of the JS gotchas, and I'm not clear on the many ways that CS let's you do something, especially in comparison to JS. If anything it protects you a bit, by trying to enforce some of the "good parts".

http://arcturo.github.io/library/coffeescript/07_the_bad_par...

To each his own, but to me CS has been and continues to be a complete and obvious win over JS. 9 times out of 10 the benefit outweighs the annoyance of requiring a preprocessor for me.

[colin_jack]

On the multiple ways, I was sure I read a post that documented them all and had me nodding along but can't find it, this one seems good though [1].

[1] http://ceronman.com/2012/09/17/coffeescript-less-typing-bad-...

[rapind]

Out of all of those points, it's really just the commas and curlies that I've found can lead to some confusion, in my experience at least.

I haven't come up with a better approach than simply agreeing on a convention with your team though TBH. It's not too bad when everyone's on the same page and familiar with the gotchas (same could be said for most langs).

I put together a post comparing some of the syntax differences as it relates to building ReactJS components in case you're interested: http://rapin.com/blog/2015/02/03/reactjs-with-coffeescript/

Given that JS itself has quite a few different ways to do things though, it's kind of a wash.

[stdbrouw]

> CS got one thing wrong that Python got right: There are many ways to do things.

I don't think this is necessarily true anymore, if it ever was. For hash-like datastructures in Python, please choose between object/dict/namedtuple/enum. In JS/CS all higher-level manipulations are dealt with through functions, whereas in Python depending on the situation you need factories, decorators, metaclasses and so on. And on a purely practical level people are moving away from the standard library (instead preferring arrow, requests, various unittest replacements etc.) but you'll still want to know the stdlib equivalents in case you encounter them in other code... and I can keep going like this.

I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, sometimes one-size-fits-all just doesn't cut it, I just don't think Python can lay claim to being a simple language anymore.

[marcandre]

> There are many ways to do things

Hopefully you realize that most Rubyists will strongly disagree and think that's not a "problem".

[juliangregorian]

What's with the specious slam on Ruby out of nowhere?

Don't forget, Python is the community that brought us "There's Only One Way To Do It".