Comment by xlii
7 months ago
It wasn't a horror story but a simple fact that it was layer of complexity that wasn't really helpful at all.
When code volume was small, nobody noticed, and hey "it looks nice". Some time after though, when volume increased it started to get really burdensome. I used this as a part of Rails pipeline, so it was like: write some coffeescript, compile, run - something failed - usual process.
However the code was already mangled, often source code mapping didn't want to work. When source code was found it wasn't uncommon that it caused by operator precedence or code not transpiled in a way it was intended and requiring debugging transpilation process.
At some point I suggested to migrate away from CoffeeScript toward (almost plain) JavaScript and most developers happily agreed to that. We were able to migrate big chunk automatically, rest took only few weeks to clean up. Velocity increased and people were happy they don't have to deal with it anymore.
Ultimatelly it is the truth with most of the transpilers - sooner or later you get into idiosyncracies that - if technology is not popular enough - you're left alone to solve.
ah, yes, i agree, in the end it is still javascript under the hood, and you'll reach the limit with transpilers. what about your php and python stories? :-)
PHP I worked on from v4 for couple of years. My main gripe was that it was full of idiosyncrasies, implicit knowledge, heavily inconsistent and heavy on the boilerplate. After moving to Django I felt I could finally think about logic, and not checking if this one dude didn't use non MB prefixed function on string (which - for unaware - could end up splitting utf8 char into two).
As for Python3 there was this thing that at some point Python was supposed to move from 2 to 3. This change was to bring plenty of incompatible changes, and in a way that migration was outright impossible in normal sized projects. Then community split into two parts, some said "F-- it" and held on to Python2 and some said "F-- it" and moved to other technologies. In the end Python2 was sustained for many years (originally sunset period was short) but those who moved out didn't consider it "stable tech" anymore.