Node.js Knockout 2011: CoffeeScript

I tried to investigate how many of the approximately 300 teams in the Node.js Knockout this weekend are using CoffeeScript: There is a team named "CoffeeScript is for Closures" but otherwise, I couldn't discover much yet. It should be possible to get a count by looking at the teams' repos after the event; if so, I will do a follow-up post listing the teams that competed with CoffeeScript, hopefully with some analysis of their performance.

Significantly, the nodeknockout.com site itself is coded in CoffeeScript (source here on GitHub, CoffeeScript and other dependencies listed here). If you haven't visited yet, check it out now for a real-time display of the action on the #nodeknockout IRC channel.

Jeremy Ashkenas CoffeeScript Video GoRuCo 2011

The home page for CoffeeScript is a benchmark example of succinct, dense, and entertaining documentation. But if you haven't made it through it because you don't like reading, or if you have read it once but would like to see the movie version, you must check out this recent video of Jeremy Ashkenas at GoRuCo 2011. He's great, and so is the production quality of the video. I highly recommend.


GoRuCo 2011 - Jeremy Ashkenas - CoffeeScript for the Well-Rounded Rubyist from Gotham Ruby Conference on Vimeo.

Notice that like many great software designers, he uses his hands to describe things in terms of 3-dimensional space a fair bit.

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.