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Comment by mrcwinn | Hacker News Reader

Happy to read this. My own gripe is open source projects that are CoffeeScript-first. CoffeeScript is a tool. Some people like it, some people hate it, and some people just don't get a big enough win from it to care. JavaScript is the native language, and to expect someone to read documentation or source code in something that might not be familiar to them is a frightening direction or tendency.

If you are writing docs, you should be writing JavaScript.

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To pose a counter-argument: should all open-source projects avoid jQuery? For many projects, it's a huge time saver, doesn't cause issues, and plenty of people like it. I totally agree that if you want more people to use your code, you should consider the implications of tools like these, but often the tradeoff is worth it.

You don't have to use my code, so I'm going to use the tools that I think give the best results.

I think there's a difference between a dependency on a library, and choosing a syntax or language. If you do not rely on jQuery, or jQuery doesn't move your code forward, you absolutely should not depend on it. You can always spin off a pluginized version. Of course, jQuery is as near a standard component as JavaScript has, so I'm not surprised to see it so often as a dependency.

On the other hand, people learn JavaScript. It's the language of the web. CoffeeScript is something some developers prefer, and others do not prefer. Any CoffeeScript developer can read JavaScript, its native parent, but the opposite is not true.

Therefore, I respectfully stand by my original argument. :-)

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