How CoffeeScript Got Forgotten
It’s been over 10 years since the release of CoffeeScript, and it seems this innovative idea’s been completely forgotten
A Clairvoyant Idea
In 2015, the advent of ES6 brought with it one of the largest revolutions in the world of JavaScript. It presented a lot of new functionalities — and thus new possibilities: arrow functions, classes, inheritance, defining variables using let, and much more. However, were they really such new solutions for a language like JS?
Well, in 2009 Jeremy Ashkenas (now a writer for the New York Times) came up with a rather interesting idea. His idea would embellish and increase the readability of, in some cases, quite complicated JavaScript code. Drawing inspiration from Python and Ruby, Ashkenas created a programming language that compiles into JavaScript called CoffeeScript.
It was the first to present the concept of creating a function without a superfluous keyword function, replacing it with something that in 2015 was to become the function arrow (=> in ES6, -> in CoffeeScript). He also got rid of the curly braces (like Python), replacing them with indentations. Often in CoffeeScript, you can omit (once required) parentheses, that often unnecessarily decrement the readability of the code.
In the beginning, as with most new improvements to iconic languages such as JavaScript, quite a lot of people approached CoffeeScript with great optimism (saying that it’d replace JavaScript) or with extreme pessimism (saying that in a moment, CoffeeScript would also be replaced by something even better or that syntax improvements are unnecessary and senseless).
However, despite the large wave of criticism in 2011, CoffeeScript was one of the most followed projects on GitHub. At that time, it enjoyed relatively high popularity in the Ruby-developers community. A large part of CS supporters said their code ran faster and was three times shorter than JS code. Even the JavaScript founder himself — Brendan Eich — said over time that CoffeeScript had a significant impact on his thoughts about the future of JavaScript.
There were many indications that CoffeeScript would be with us for a long time, but a lot changed to its disadvantage in 2015 after the introduction of JavaScript’s ES6 — which actually was an implementation of CS solutions into the language from which the story began. In ES6, JavaScript also added many interesting new features the CoffeeScript team’s engineers didn’t think about.
The Test of Time
JavaScript has been evolving ever since, introducing and improving many aspects of the language.
Then, people from programming communities (mainly front-end) realized that CoffeeScript is out of date and is starting to lag behind the ever-evolving Javascript environment. As of today, January 2020, CoffeeScript is completely dead on the market (though the GitHub repository is still kind of alive).
Knowledge of this language isn’t a sought after skill for a programmer but a rather exotic (often unnecessary) add on, and platforms such as LinkedIn are no longer even adapted to add skills connected with this language.
In summary, CoffeeScript began as a fantastic idea (making it easier to write JavaScript code); ultimately, however, it didn’t stand the test of time and was pushed out by JavaScript. Currently, hardly anyone remembers it. Most new people in the front-end environment don’t even know such a language existed. Instead of being included in lists of the most popular new programming languages, it takes top spots on the lists of the worst languages to learn.
And finally, despite all these kind words, I have to admit I also gave up CoffeeScript and switched to JS with React.
Further Reading
You can learn more about CoffeeScript on their official website.
