This is not an unfair criticism, especially if one considers that CoffeeScript compiles into JavaScript.Experience CTO 2019-Present | Resurgo GeneticsĪpplying Machine Learning and novel visualization techniques to find target candidates for therapeutics in diseases such as cancer and now COVID‑19.ĭeveloper 2018 | Code for Science and Society The first comment on the blog reads: “You guys seriously have nothing better to do than rewrite software that already works?”

“Regardless, fewer lines is beneficial for simple reasons”, the team explains, citing fitting more code into a single editor screen as an example. The team does admit, however, that regarding complexity of code, it’s not as easy to measure it in terms of throwing a few figures out there. In total, 5020 lines of code were dropped, 9276 tokens were shaved off and 205863 characters were lost. Of particular interest, and where the Dropbox team disagrees, is the argument that while CoffeeScript may be faster to read, JavaScript may be faster to comprehend.

Similarly, the Dropbox devs disagree with an argument from Ryan Florence concerning the deficiencies of CoffeeScript (to which Florence has since stated he’s a CoffeeScript convert). “Considering the strange, difficult and rushed circumstances of its origin, JavaScript did many things well,” the blog states, “but is it any surprise that it got a bunch of things wrong too?”

The developers used converter js2coffee for their mammoth rewriting task, mainly to avoid doing the dull-although-it’s-got-to-be-done conversion tasks. Cloud file hosting service Dropbox is now running in CoffeeScript over JavaScript, with Dropbox devs converting and debugging more than 23,000 lines of JavaScript into CoffeeScript during Hackweek.Īccording to the developers’ blog, the primary reason for the switch is because CoffeeScript takes out a lot of unnecessary coding syntax – more than 5000 lines of code were taken off from Dropbox after the conversion (23437 for JS against 18417 for CoffeeScript, respectively).

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