I was at Groupon when we switched to 100% CoffeeScript. Honestly, it was a pain in the ass - from what I can remember there were multiple implementations of the spec that were supposed to do exactly the same thing, but occasionally didn't, which lead to weird bugs.
It had a lot of hype behind it, in much the same way TypeScript does now.
>Was it always an early adopter, “look how forward we are” kind of thing, or was it just popular with Rubyists?
Hard to say. Groupon still used it even after they ditched Ruby for node.js (and lost a whole bunch of engineers that wanted to continue using Ruby).
>I’m trying to calibrate it with other possibly-next-big-thing front end languages.
There is always another next-big-thing front end language/framework/library/tool. They all promise to change the world. I've personally used C with CGI-BIN, Perl, ASP.net, PHP (back when it was Personal Home Page), Java with servlets, J++ (the Microsoft "embrace, extend, extinguish" version of Java. Seriously, fuck Microsoft for doing this), J2EE, Struts, Seam, Spring, Struts2, SpringBoot, Jquery, AngularJS, Angular without TypeScript, Angular with TypeScript, React (and that whole ecosystem) and I'm sure I'm forgetting a few - every one of them promised to be "the future".
In the end, most front-end developers seem to spend half their working hours learning a new stack because of the constant change. This is fine - learning stuff quickly is part of the job, but sometimes I wish we would collectively take a pause for a year without any new frameworks, transpilers, meta-languages etc. etc. and just focus on seeing what stuff works best in the longer term.
I'd like us to collectively remember Antoine de Saint-Exupery's maxim "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." instead of adding three hundred "essential" node.js libraries on to the next CRUD app we build.
I think it's important to learn the basics well first. Just make some stuff with hand-coded HTML, maybe a bit of CSS, some forms (or AJAX-like calls if you must) and something on the server to do some processing on the stuff you send it and spit back a result. Or, even, just spend a bit of time appreciating the beauty of motherfuckingwebsite.com
It had a lot of hype behind it, in much the same way TypeScript does now.
>Was it always an early adopter, “look how forward we are” kind of thing, or was it just popular with Rubyists?
Hard to say. Groupon still used it even after they ditched Ruby for node.js (and lost a whole bunch of engineers that wanted to continue using Ruby).
>I’m trying to calibrate it with other possibly-next-big-thing front end languages.
There is always another next-big-thing front end language/framework/library/tool. They all promise to change the world. I've personally used C with CGI-BIN, Perl, ASP.net, PHP (back when it was Personal Home Page), Java with servlets, J++ (the Microsoft "embrace, extend, extinguish" version of Java. Seriously, fuck Microsoft for doing this), J2EE, Struts, Seam, Spring, Struts2, SpringBoot, Jquery, AngularJS, Angular without TypeScript, Angular with TypeScript, React (and that whole ecosystem) and I'm sure I'm forgetting a few - every one of them promised to be "the future".
In the end, most front-end developers seem to spend half their working hours learning a new stack because of the constant change. This is fine - learning stuff quickly is part of the job, but sometimes I wish we would collectively take a pause for a year without any new frameworks, transpilers, meta-languages etc. etc. and just focus on seeing what stuff works best in the longer term.
I'd like us to collectively remember Antoine de Saint-Exupery's maxim "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." instead of adding three hundred "essential" node.js libraries on to the next CRUD app we build.
I think it's important to learn the basics well first. Just make some stuff with hand-coded HTML, maybe a bit of CSS, some forms (or AJAX-like calls if you must) and something on the server to do some processing on the stuff you send it and spit back a result. Or, even, just spend a bit of time appreciating the beauty of motherfuckingwebsite.com