Re: RFS: coffeescript
On 04/01/2010 06:03 AM, Christoph Egger wrote:
> Quoting Upstream Website:
>
>> Disclaimer: CoffeeScript is just for fun. Until it reaches 1.0,
>> there are no guarantees that the syntax won't change between
>> versions. That said, it compiles into clean JavaScript (the good
>> parts) that can use existing JavaScript libraries seamlessly, and
>> passes through JSLint without warnings. The compiled output is quite
>> readable — pretty-printed, with comments preserved intact.
>
> Do you think it's sensible to have that packaged in debian (and
> it's stable releases)? Looks rather like a volatile thing where one
> wants for a 1.0 before packaging to me (though that impressin is based
> on a quick look on the webpage so you may know better ;))
>
I'd agree with your worries if this were a purely interpreted language
like Python, where changes in the interpreter require entire program
rewrites so that existing deployments can still run. However, this is a
compiled language, which outputs to standard Javascript. Hence, even in
the unlikely case that a huge change makes existing programs
uncompilable (I say unlikely because coffeescript has done a good job of
maintaining backwards compatibility with releases), then the existing
compiled Javascript that has been deployed will still work. Since this
is primarily used for short-term web development, and not huge
multi-year projects, then the question of whether a program will still
compile years later is less of an issue.
Also note that Debian is already ripe with languages which haven't yet
reached 1.0 and are still adding new syntactic features, like boo. I
believe so long as there aren't Debian packages that depend on
coffeescript to get compiled, the availability of this package shouldn't
cause additional maintainability issues, and as with any cutting-edge
development tools, it should be left up to the user whether to use them
or not.
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