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Despite being a huge CoffeeScript fan, having convinced our company to use it for the past 3+ years, and personally using it for ~5 years (https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/issues/439), this article is missing one point. Community. Yes, there will be a CoffeeScript community that lingers on, but as things are looking now it won't be near as vibrant as it once was. Not only are there (seemingly) less people using CoffeeScript, but major related projects—such as CoffeeScriptRedux—are closing up shop (see this comment: https://github.com/michaelficarra/CoffeeScriptRedux/issues/3...
). On the other hand, ES6 (and transpilers like Babel and Tracuer) are very popular right now. Some of that is hype & fad, but a lot of it is legitimate. In particular, I think that changes like the new module syntax are going to dramatically change Javascript development (even if we all transpile, speaking a unified module language is a huge improvement). So, while I think it is totally reasonable to continue using CoffeeScript (and part of me really wants to!), it is hard to ignore/shun the community and momentum being ES6. For a while I was optimistically thinking that someone would eventually release CoffeeScript 2 (or even better, CoffeeScript6) that intentionally broke backwards compatibility to merge with ES6 semantics (classes, modules, etc). But now I'm thinking that is less and less likely (IMHO, CoffeeScriptRedux seemed like the best chance for that to happen). I don't know if I'm ready to completely give up hope yet, but I think the article misses the point, community—and the (potential?) lack thereof—is one of, if not the most important thing to consider regarding your choice of language. |