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Comment by gren | Hacker News Reader

I like CoffeeScript but I see it as a temporary language providing cool syntax features on top of Javascript.

no offense but IMHO, we should focus on releasing the next Javascript and make it possible instead of writing better CoffeeScript compilers.

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The problem is that making a better JavaScript you can actually use is a lot harder than making a better CoffeeScript. If you make a better CoffeeScript, you just have to write one compiler for it, written in JavaScript. If you make a better JavaScript, you have to lobby all of the major browser vendors to accept it. And then you have to wait for the browser teams to write the compiler. And even if you write the compilers yourself really fast for all of the open-source projects, you still have to wait for the Internet Explorer team to upgrade their compiler - you can't speed that up, because IE is closed-source. And finally, you can't safely use that new JavaScript on most sites until a few years later, when most people have upgraded their browsers. Whereas compiled CoffeeScript runs on even old browsers.

Of course compiling to JS as CoffeeScript does is itself the answer to the IE issue. If and when there is a new JS one could conceivably compile the new JS to old JS for IE users. It adds an extra burden on dev teams but IE special cases aren't anything new to web devs and it allows the standard to move more quickly.

What prevents "new" JavaScript from being compiled like CS is being compiled now?

This is an excellent idea, and is the goal of a project that Google announced at JSConf 2011 with much fanfare (some of it from Brendan Eich himself), Traceur: http://code.google.com/p/traceur-compiler/

However, Traceur has gained little traction. With the announcement of Dart, it's clear that Google's heart isn't really into the project.

Why don't we spend effort on building an ES:Harmony -> ES3 compiler rather then a CoffeeScript -> ES3 compiler.

It's more worthwhile future facing project.

The next version of javascript will only work on a minority of browsers, even years after it is adopted (http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/04/internet-explor...) while coffeescript works on all browsers now.

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