Just wanted to say thank you for CoffeeScript. Despite its somewhat ambiguous syntax it really was a better version of JavaScript, and it would be fair to say it really mainstreamed the idea of JS as a target language. Many of the ideas in CS made it all the way to ES6. Many other ideas didn't make it to ES6 because CS fleshed out issues that quite possibly would have been missed otherwise.
It was a huge net positive for web development. 2009-2011 were really heady times - a whole programming community emerged from a deep, dark cave with new tools and a new optimism for the web.
Ditto. CoffeeScript made JS almost Ruby-level fun for me. I've now switched mainly to TypeScript, which is also great (so many fewer runtime errors!). But I still miss thin arrow functions, array comprehensions, the existential operator ... What I really want these days is CoffeeScript on top of TypeScript.
Same. Idiomatic Coffeescript was so much fun it gave me a borderline obsession with brevity. Array comprehensions also largely removed the need for lodash/underscore.
Give me an optionally typed, ES6-flavored Coffeescript and I'll be a happy developer.
I've never written CoffeeScript, but I agree that it had a significant impact on the evolution of the ECMAScript standard. A simple example, arrow functions, lexical scope (const, let), and `this` binding.
It was a huge net positive for web development. 2009-2011 were really heady times - a whole programming community emerged from a deep, dark cave with new tools and a new optimism for the web.