Does CoffeeScript Have a Future?

CoffeeScript is presented as widely adopted and genuinely useful, with support in Rails, GitHub’s style guide, and Gaslight’s own work. The post asks whether that still guarantees a future, given that JavaScript remains the shared language and is itself evolving.

Reading notes

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• CoffeeScript is described as having made JavaScript development more interesting and more enjoyable.
• Rails, GitHub, and Gaslight are cited as examples of support and use.
• Discourse is given as an example of a project that decided to stop writing CoffeeScript in favor of JavaScript.
• CoffeeScript can discourage contributors who do not know it, while JavaScript is still the language everyone has to understand.
• CoffeeScript adds compilation and integration machinery, which the post treats as a real cost.
• ES6 is expected to add features such as destructuring assignment, string interpolation, classes, loops and array comprehensions, default arguments and splats, and arrow functions.
• The post says JavaScript has been influenced by CoffeeScript and may absorb enough of its advantages to make CoffeeScript less necessary.
• ES6 may also create incompatibilities that could break CoffeeScript-compiled applications.
• CoffeeScript is said to need ongoing maintenance to keep pace with JavaScript.
• The post ends by saying CoffeeScript has already been a major win, even if its future is uncertain.