I have not tried Node (or in fact JS as a whole) yet. But it seems very hard to avoid JS in these days. I am going to learn it in a few months. Can anyone give me a rough idea how bad it is? (I know some Obj-C so is JS worse than that?)
People who only have a PHP background, for instance, have become accustomed to such stupidity. They think it's "normal", solely because they don't really know any better.
Those coming from C, C++, Java, C#, Ruby, Python or most other languages, on the other hand, know that the JavaScript way is not the right way. These people generally have a much harder time coming to terms with JavaScript's numerous issues.
I'm also coming from Obj-C, C and Ruby background and recently read "Javascript: The Good Parts". I'm still looking for the good parts promised in the title and introduction.
I agree; it's a shortcut for people who know JS, not for people who are learning it for the first time. As soon as you need to use or look into the internals of a library that isn't written in CoffeeScript, everything's going to get unstuck pretty quickly.
For many learning types, I'd guess it's preferable to leisurely learn JavaScript from the shores of CoffeeScript. Rather than having to deal with all of JavaScript's absurdity at once.
And when you need to read someone else's JavaScript code, you can usually get away with ignoring boilerplate.
My big beef with js is that there's no 'right' way to lay out your code. Trying to figure out how a js module works is always a unnecessarily massive pita.
In my mind, that alone makes JavaScript a bad language.
There are some trivial gotchas in Javascript, but same can be said for most languages. Most importantly weird type promotion system, variable & function hoisting and prototypal inheritance can cause some gray hairs. All those can be lived with, and prototypes are in some ways superior to "classical" inheritance.
C, C++, Java, Javascript, Lua(JIT), Perl and ObjC are languages I normally use.
* [1] http://wtfjs.com
* [2] https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-languages-that-compile-to-JSBut, as much as I like CS and hate (really hate) JS, I have to agree with you wholeheartedly. You must know JavaScript well. Variable/function hoisting won't bite you in CS, but other JS idiocies will.
Read Douglas Crockford's "JavaScript: The Good Parts" at least twice (and take a lot of notes). It's the best no-bullshit book on JavaScript (the language, not "how to use JavaScript in Node/front-end web design") around.