Aug 22, 2011

Interview with Jeremy Ashkenas

Traveling back in time to this January 2011 interview with Jeremy Ashkenas, it's amazing to hear how much he played down the attractiveness of CoffeeScript for programmers:

If the question is "why is CoffeeScript not a DocumentCloud project?" - it's because I can't justify using it for the main DocumentCloud development. Imagine trying to hire someone. "You'll have to learn to use a new language that we made up..."
What a difference a few months can make. In April, about two weeks after the news broke on GitHub that CoffeeScript would be a default in Rails 3.1,  I was in a job interview where I was told that as of the Rails 3.1 release (perceived at the time to be just around the corner), all JavaScript coding would be done in CoffeeScript, and as much of the existing JavaScript codebase as possible would be ported. Well, I enthusiastically accepted what I hoped to be my first professional opportunity with CoffeeScript, and it has turned out to be fantastic. Rails 3.1 has still not been released, but that didn't stop us, we switched new development completely over to CoffeeScript in early summer.

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