Why Do All the Great Node.js Developers Hate CoffeeScript?

Why do all the great Node.js developers hate CoffeeScript?

Take a look at the following Github repositories of the well-known Node.js developers:

Isaac Schleuter (maintainer of Node.js / NPM)
TJ Holowaychuk (express, Jade, Mocha)
Mikeal Rogers (Request)
James Haliday "substack" (Browserify, dnode, Optimist)
Guillermo Rauch (Socket.IO)
Aaron Heckmann (Mongoose)
Nathan Rajich "Too Tall Nate" (node-gyp)
Marak Squires (Hook.io, pdf.js, color.js)
Felix Geisendörfer
Tim Caswell (NVM)

Did you look at them? Not one of them has a project (that isn't forked) that is written in CoffeeScript. So does the absence of CoffeeScript on Github imply these developers hate it? Absolutely not. Listen to episode 18 or 19 of Nodeup (don't remember which one) but there are a couple of instances where they (expert Node.js devs) joke and laugh about writing in CoffeeScript. If this offensive? Of course not. But the attitude is curious to me.

One of the aforementioned developers said the following about a technology:

What if we could omit braces? How about semi-colons?

Sounds like the developer is talking about CoffeeScript, doesn't it? No, it was TJ Holowaychuk describing Stylus, his CSS replacement language. Look at Stylus, look how CoffeeScript-esque it is. This is the the same TJ that doesn't like CoffeeScript. This is meant to be partially tongue & cheek, but it does lend credance to my point.

Can you guess what the second most depended-upon package is on NPM? If you guessed CoffeeScript, you'd be right!

So if it's the second most depended-upon package, it must be in use by us mere-mortal developers. Having defected from Rails, I love CoffeeScript. But, I ask again, why do the greats have a haughty attitude towards CoffeeScript? This isn't meant to be a crusade trying to get people to convert to the holier-than-though CoffeeScript, but a genuine lack of understanding of why the disdain exists. Especially given the acceptance towards Haml, SASS, SCSS, Jade, etc. I mean, when it comes down to it, write in whatever makes you happy, but I feel like I'm missing something. If you're part of the Node.js community, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Looking over the CoffeeScript page, I think that you can safely conclude that in general, you'll write less lines of code using CoffeeScript. Code is our enemy so that's a good thing.

What do you think about CoffeeScript? Why do you think these developers don't like CoffeeScript?

More fun CoffeeScript hatred:

If you made it this far, you should follow me on Twitter.

-JP

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