So you had jQuery experience and were inhibited by working on a MooTools project. I get that, makes total sense.
But then you say that switching to CoffeeScript may seem like a better long term choice but "in reality it is not so much."
Surely MooTools would've been fine for you as a long term choice.
Yes, there is a penalty to switching. Whether it's jQuery to MooTools, JS to CS, whatever. But that doesn't make it a bad long term choice.
Also, CoffeeScript is more than just saving keystrokes. That makes it seem like it's all about initial up-front cost savings. Instead, it's about having shorter, more expressive code. That pays dividends for the life of a project.
yes, but at the expense of a lot of other negative baggages that comes along with it. by having it's own compiler rather than leaving that to the browser seems like it's opening a can of worms.
and just reading from the comments, i can see how we could soon see a birth of "another language", that's supposed to be solve all problems coffeescript'ers face.
for one, i guess readability seems to be the common problem, which isn't good for productivity.
Don't you find it a little odd that you have such strong opinions on something you've never even tried?
That's called incremental progress a d most people see it as a good thing. Others yell, "Get off my lawn!"
Maybe saying it's widely accepted isn't entirely appropriate, but it certainly is gaining a lot of traction.
Once you are releasing things outside of your controlled/team environment using anything but JS is just a loop for others to jump through.
Considering that, releases would be in JS, as they should be.
if you now switch to coffeescript, something not remotely close to javascript or any other languages fwiw, you'll experience un-productivity. it's akin to having your top developers walking in eggshells and doing nearly nothing close to what he is capable of.
i think coffeescript is great in the sense that we are trying to create a better language. but i also sense how much damage it can bring to budding startups who can't find talented coffeescript'ers to fill the void when their lead developer moves on to other things.
a one off go project, i'd say it's fine. but anything more complex, i think you'll see programmers wishing they had gone back to what they were familiar with.
That's true for any tool/language/platform/whatever, everything has a learning curve (and coffeescript's is quite short). Going by your words we shouldn't ever learn anything.
And you shouldn't switch to a language if your developers are not comfortable with it. Do some experiments, try it out on a smaller project, then you might switch if you see good results.
i recall the days when i was thrown into a project where the requirement was to use mootools, rather than jquery. even though they are both "javascript" in nature, it severely limited my productivity. i can see the same thing happening to companies trying out coffeescript, it may seem like you are doing the better thing long-term wise, but in reality, it is not so much. it's better to just stick to standards and you'll be more productive down the line, i can almost guarantee it.