It's heartening to see so many people responding to this poll. I hopped on the CoffeeScript bandwagon more than a year ago; a week of using it was enough to convince me to stop writing pure JS. It's become my favorite language, even overtaking Ruby. (Cue dhh at last month's RailsConf keynote: "Looking at CoffeeScript was the first time I got language envy.")
These last six months have been amazing: In December, CoffeeScript hit 1.0. In April, it officially became a part of Rails. In May, Jeremy Ashkenas gave a talk alongside Brendan Eich at JSConf. That same month, the beta of my book was PragProg's #1 direct seller.
So who knows what the next year holds for CoffeeScript? It's probably never going to take off in cubicle-land—and for that we should be grateful. But I would like to see it get more traction beyond the Ruby and Node.js worlds. (Pythonistas, represent!) And I'm sure we'll see far more high-profile projects written in it... and not just at 37signals.
For web developers, JavaScript is where the action is right now. And CoffeeScript is, in my opinion, the best way to write JavaScript.
I agree -- CoffeeScript is the best way to write JavaScript right now. I very recently had a great experience writing a mobile web application using it, and I'm pleased that it's now an official part of Rails.
Like most languages at 1.0, though, it has some growing to do. I still find myself needing to dive down into the compiled JavaScript to make sure it's doing what I think it's doing in some unclear situations (nested data structures we used in our tests, for example). I've seldom found a need to take similar actions in more mature languages and I'm sure that will improve as CoffeeScript development continues.
I warmly welcome any tool that makes my life as a developer easier or more enjoyable (CoffeeScript does both) and I hope its success continues to inspire the growth of client-side web development languages.
It's heartening to see so many people responding to this poll. I hopped on the CoffeeScript bandwagon more than a year ago; a week of using it was enough to convince me to stop writing pure JS. It's become my favorite language, even overtaking Ruby. (Cue dhh at last month's RailsConf keynote: "Looking at CoffeeScript was the first time I got language envy.")
These last six months have been amazing: In December, CoffeeScript hit 1.0. In April, it officially became a part of Rails. In May, Jeremy Ashkenas gave a talk alongside Brendan Eich at JSConf. That same month, the beta of my book was PragProg's #1 direct seller.
So who knows what the next year holds for CoffeeScript? It's probably never going to take off in cubicle-land—and for that we should be grateful. But I would like to see it get more traction beyond the Ruby and Node.js worlds. (Pythonistas, represent!) And I'm sure we'll see far more high-profile projects written in it... and not just at 37signals.
For web developers, JavaScript is where the action is right now. And CoffeeScript is, in my opinion, the best way to write JavaScript.