Github: CoffeeScript cracks the top 10 languages(github.com)
github.com
Github: CoffeeScript cracks the top 10 languages
https://github.com/languages
67 comments
I don't get it.
I'm in the process of ripping the last bit of coffeescript out of our code. The marginal benefits of the language don't exceed the costs of having another build dependency, and another syntax to understand. For daily work, I already have to switch contexts between Javascript, CSS, SCSS, HTML, rHTML, HAML and Ruby (not to mention other tools like Bash, Rake, etc., along with API knowledge like the Rails API, jQuery, and all of the various un- or poorly-documented gems). Ultimately, it's a huge mental burden. Every new thing is a new thing that someone has to understand to be productive.
To justify the extra mental cost of another piece of technology, it has to do something pretty amazing. A minor syntactical transformation of javascript just doesn't cut it.
I'm in the process of ripping the last bit of coffeescript out of our code. The marginal benefits of the language don't exceed the costs of having another build dependency, and another syntax to understand. For daily work, I already have to switch contexts between Javascript, CSS, SCSS, HTML, rHTML, HAML and Ruby (not to mention other tools like Bash, Rake, etc., along with API knowledge like the Rails API, jQuery, and all of the various un- or poorly-documented gems). Ultimately, it's a huge mental burden. Every new thing is a new thing that someone has to understand to be productive.
To justify the extra mental cost of another piece of technology, it has to do something pretty amazing. A minor syntactical transformation of javascript just doesn't cut it.
It's more expressive. It's like going from having a 19" monitor with 1440x900 to a 24" monitor with 1920x1080. Sure, you can do all the things you can normally do with the 24" monitor that you could do with the 19" monitor, but it isn't as pleasant or efficient.
The place it best fits in right now is for in-house software development at a place with a low turnover of developers. 37signals has a very low turnover, so it shouldn't be surprising that it fits them well. That mental burden is low, compared with the time saved using it.
The place it best fits in right now is for in-house software development at a place with a low turnover of developers. 37signals has a very low turnover, so it shouldn't be surprising that it fits them well. That mental burden is low, compared with the time saved using it.
"It's like going from having a 19" monitor with 1440x900 to a 24" monitor with 1920x1080."
Ehh....I think you're overstating it, but to each their own. To make the comparison fair, you'd have to turn it into something more obtrusive: it's like going from a 19" monitor to a 20" monitor that's driven by one of those $300 USB video cards that gets really hot and eats up desk space and might occasionally cause RFI problems with my wireless mouse.
Or more directly, it's like going from Ruby to Python, or vice-versa, by using a tool that converts one to the other. They're different, and they have different syntactical features, but the annoyances of either language balance the benefits to the extent that I can't confidently exclaim that one is better. And the auto-generation step would just cause pain.
The critical difference here is that to use coffeescript, I have to add another (IMNSHO) annoying step to my build process. Another layer of indirection to obfuscate bugs. Another sprocket that can come unglued and bork my app at any time. No thanks. I'll stick with my current complexity level, and write my list comprehensions as loops.
Ehh....I think you're overstating it, but to each their own. To make the comparison fair, you'd have to turn it into something more obtrusive: it's like going from a 19" monitor to a 20" monitor that's driven by one of those $300 USB video cards that gets really hot and eats up desk space and might occasionally cause RFI problems with my wireless mouse.
Or more directly, it's like going from Ruby to Python, or vice-versa, by using a tool that converts one to the other. They're different, and they have different syntactical features, but the annoyances of either language balance the benefits to the extent that I can't confidently exclaim that one is better. And the auto-generation step would just cause pain.
The critical difference here is that to use coffeescript, I have to add another (IMNSHO) annoying step to my build process. Another layer of indirection to obfuscate bugs. Another sprocket that can come unglued and bork my app at any time. No thanks. I'll stick with my current complexity level, and write my list comprehensions as loops.
My build process is automated, so it's not a huge darn to me if my computer has to run one additional program once in a while. It's running dozens of them all the time. And if you find CoffeeScript creates a lot of JavaScript bugs that aren't in your CoffeeScript source (adding "another layer of indirection to obfuscate bugs"), I think your experience is atypical.
And as for "obtrusive," I guess that's just subjective.
And as for "obtrusive," I guess that's just subjective.
Apart from the fact that Python can be infinitely faster than rails, I'd just say that any more javascript is bad news, bee it coffee based or node based or whatever. Someone forgot to go back in time and shoot John "javascript" Connor.
On topic, your main problem is that you're playing the one man army with too many tools, that is obviously unrelated to CS or any language.
It's likely you wouldn't mind the additional complexity if you were only working on front-end.
On topic, your main problem is that you're playing the one man army with too many tools, that is obviously unrelated to CS or any language.
It's likely you wouldn't mind the additional complexity if you were only working on front-end.
> "Apart from the fact that Python can be infinitely faster than rails"
Don't you mean Ruby?
Don't you mean Ruby?
indeed.
> A minor syntactical transformation of javascript just doesn't cut it.
If every CoffeScript program shared the same AST as its generated JavaScript program, i.e. if only the parse tree representing the concrete syntax differed, then your statement would be true.
However, that is not the case. The abstract syntax of CoffeeScript differs significantly from JavaScript, for example in CoffeeScript almost every statement is also an expression, which is not the case in JavaScript.
If every CoffeScript program shared the same AST as its generated JavaScript program, i.e. if only the parse tree representing the concrete syntax differed, then your statement would be true.
However, that is not the case. The abstract syntax of CoffeeScript differs significantly from JavaScript, for example in CoffeeScript almost every statement is also an expression, which is not the case in JavaScript.
I've just removed the last lines of RJS code from my app. So now I can upgrade to Rails 3.2 and use CoffeeScript :)
But this time I'll wait for something like Dart.
But this time I'll wait for something like Dart.
It'd be nice to have someone from GitHub comment on how these rankings are calculated. Raw LOC? Percentage of projects with at least one X language file in them? Percentage of projects that have a plurality of source code in X language?
I second this request. Been wondering more about this process ever since I noticed, sometime in January, that Rust (a nascent language with very little use yet) was ranked in the low-20s for language popularity. The problem likely had to do with how the Rust devs registered their language with Github's Linguist[1] project; Rust's units of compilation ("crates") have the .rc extension, and Github must have taken this to mean that every project with a .rc file (notably many Android-specific projects) contained Rust code. The Rust devs have since revoked that association from Linguist[2], but since Github takes a while to reevaluate a project's language breakdown, the language's popularity ranking on Github is still artificially inflated (sitting at #31 at the moment).
[1] https://github.com/github/linguist
[2] https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/1512
[1] https://github.com/github/linguist
[2] https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/1512
.rc files don't dominate a project in file count or SLOC, so I think the answer to jashkenas' question is something like this:
pop[lang] = avg(loc(proj, lang) / loc(proj) for proj in projects)That depends on the project:
https://github.com/CM7-GB/android_device_motorola_droid2we
Note the language breakdown, under the Graphs tab.
But yes, it all hinges on how Github measures popularity. For one, I'm curious how forked repositories are counted; if I have a 100kloc Blub project and it gets forked 100 times, does Github count that as 100,000 or 10,000,000 lines of Blub?
https://github.com/CM7-GB/android_device_motorola_droid2we
Note the language breakdown, under the Graphs tab.
But yes, it all hinges on how Github measures popularity. For one, I'm curious how forked repositories are counted; if I have a 100kloc Blub project and it gets forked 100 times, does Github count that as 100,000 or 10,000,000 lines of Blub?
defunkt has confirmed that at least in the past if you had a repo with 100 Perl files and one JavaScript file it would count equally towards both languages.
My guess is the latter.
It's the number of occurrences of a language in all public repositories. Most web applications on GitHub have some javascript, for instance.
They said it couldn't be done, but CoffeeScript bumped Objective-C down to #11.
Of course, I think it's fair to say that there's more Obj-C code than CoffeeScript being written, but less of it is being open-sourced.
Of course, I think it's fair to say that there's more Obj-C code than CoffeeScript being written, but less of it is being open-sourced.
Yeah, that seems like a good explanation. Obj-C has 85574 questions on StackOverflow, CoffeeScript has 1476.
http://stackoverflow.com/tags
http://stackoverflow.com/tags
I think those numbers also reflect something other than the obvious.
There's a huge contingent of…uh…let's just say "differently educated" developers who previously were making some delicious pasta in PHP and now want to build iPhone apps because they heard there's gold in them thar hills.
Objective-C is also a lower-level language than CoffeeScript and thus harder to use, especially if you're not used to working in a language where it's possible to free memory early or smash the stack.
So CoffeeScript is a very easy language that tends to be used by developers who are experienced in its domain, while Objective-C is a relatively hard language that has gotten a huge influx of rank amateurs in Stack Overflow's lifetime. Thus, the latter gets a disproportionate number of questions.
(For credibility's sake: I'm one of the top contributors to the Objective-C tag on Stack Overflow.)
There's a huge contingent of…uh…let's just say "differently educated" developers who previously were making some delicious pasta in PHP and now want to build iPhone apps because they heard there's gold in them thar hills.
Objective-C is also a lower-level language than CoffeeScript and thus harder to use, especially if you're not used to working in a language where it's possible to free memory early or smash the stack.
So CoffeeScript is a very easy language that tends to be used by developers who are experienced in its domain, while Objective-C is a relatively hard language that has gotten a huge influx of rank amateurs in Stack Overflow's lifetime. Thus, the latter gets a disproportionate number of questions.
(For credibility's sake: I'm one of the top contributors to the Objective-C tag on Stack Overflow.)
Other factors probably at play: Obj-C MUCH older. CoffeeScript designed to be simple and have fewer "bad parts" thus fewer questions. Many problems faced while coding CoffeeScript are actually javascript or DOM or Web questions so you don't tag them with CoffeeScript. StackOverflow isn't overly loving of CoffeeScript, so I often ask my questions using JavaScript even if my source is really CoffeeScript (and again the questions aren't really about CoffeeScript but usually about JavaScript).
Objective C has been in heavy use for a lot longer then CoffeeScript though. CoffeeScript has only been stable for over a year. Objective C has been in use since before the creation of StackOverflow.
You have to factor in all the newbies that here all this doom and gloom about the job market in the media, and the last tidbit in the news story usually mentions "but there is a lot of growth in iPhone and Android apps". This is probably causing a lot of people new to programming to learn Objective-C, thus many more questions.
It's funny that people still think there's easy money in mobile apps. The competition is getting tougher and the market more glutted every day.
You want newbies ? go javascript.
I can't believe I'm reading an argument favoring Obj-C over (any flavor of) js as a noob turf...
The simple reason there's disparity is that github is not the center of the world and objC people mostly code for money, that's all there is to it.
I can't believe I'm reading an argument favoring Obj-C over (any flavor of) js as a noob turf...
The simple reason there's disparity is that github is not the center of the world and objC people mostly code for money, that's all there is to it.
I'm not saying newbies get very far with it.
That could also say something about the languages and the platforms rather than the number of people using them, especially since all of Apple's libraries fall under the category of Obj-C. You're probably right, just wanted to point that's not necessarily a good measure either.
No doubt. This list isn't supposed to be indicative of what's being written in general-- it's about what code is on github.
I'm curious whether GitHub includes private repos in these statistics. If not, then I'd be curious how it would change things if they did (not saying they should, just curious to contemplate the difference).
We include only public repositories in those stats. I ran the numbers across the site, and the rankings don't change much. Javascript and ruby are still at the top, but Objective-C and Coffeescript are 10 and 11.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias
I don't think this says much about CoffeeScript, which I use. However I do think it says quite a bit about how GitHub has plenty of room to grow as they make themselves more attractive to a broader market.
A very interesting chart would be GitHub account revenue broken down by file extension. Note that I didn't say language, as the real money is in assets, not code.
I don't think this says much about CoffeeScript, which I use. However I do think it says quite a bit about how GitHub has plenty of room to grow as they make themselves more attractive to a broader market.
A very interesting chart would be GitHub account revenue broken down by file extension. Note that I didn't say language, as the real money is in assets, not code.
Isn't this simply a category error? C++98 and C++0x aren't separate languages, nor are Python 2.x and 3.x. CoffeeScript has good branding, but is it really its own language?
Of course CoffeeScript is its own language. What kind of requirements do you think a language requires that CoffeeScript doesn't meet?
My suggestion:
For some language X where Y “compiles to “ X, Y is a new language if it introduces new semantics. For example, pure functional semantics, or object-orientation, or pattern matching, or method flavours, or static typing.
One easy test for this is to ask whether compiling Y to X can be done in small chunks or whether it requires “Whole program rewriting.” For example, transforming a program with continuations into CPS requires whole-program rewriting. I would call any language that adds continuations to JavaScript a new language on that basis alone.
CoffeeScript is almost entirely local transformations. I think of it as JavaScript.
For some language X where Y “compiles to “ X, Y is a new language if it introduces new semantics. For example, pure functional semantics, or object-orientation, or pattern matching, or method flavours, or static typing.
One easy test for this is to ask whether compiling Y to X can be done in small chunks or whether it requires “Whole program rewriting.” For example, transforming a program with continuations into CPS requires whole-program rewriting. I would call any language that adds continuations to JavaScript a new language on that basis alone.
CoffeeScript is almost entirely local transformations. I think of it as JavaScript.
But CoffeeScript does introduce new semantics. To name a few:
• a classical object model, complete with super()
• forced strict equality
• loop-local index variables (gets around the setTimeout(function() {console.log(i)}, 100) problem)
• all variables local unless explicitly declared otherwise
• CoffeeScript's splat arrays are totally different from JavaScript's arguments object
• list comprehensions (whether this is a semantic or syntactic change is debatable, I suppose, but the same could be said for basic OO)
• everything is an expression
The last one is a biggie that completely changes the meaning of many seemingly identical blocks of code. If that isn't a semantic change, what is?
• a classical object model, complete with super()
• forced strict equality
• loop-local index variables (gets around the setTimeout(function() {console.log(i)}, 100) problem)
• all variables local unless explicitly declared otherwise
• CoffeeScript's splat arrays are totally different from JavaScript's arguments object
• list comprehensions (whether this is a semantic or syntactic change is debatable, I suppose, but the same could be said for basic OO)
• everything is an expression
The last one is a biggie that completely changes the meaning of many seemingly identical blocks of code. If that isn't a semantic change, what is?
I think differently in CS vs JS. I go for different solutions because they seem more elegant in CS than they did in JS. And if language shapes how we think, then surely thinking differently makes it a different language. Maybe.
This seems like a reasonable definition. Does CoffeeScript not have its own idioms, though? I’ve never used it myself, but a search turned up this chapter on idioms in “The Little Book on CoffeeScript”: http://arcturo.github.com/library/coffeescript/04_idioms.htm...
What about if it removes harmful semantics?
Javascript has a distinction between statements and expressions, while to my knowledge CoffeeScript does not. "Everything is an expression" is a huge difference in semantics even though nothing has been added.
Javascript has a distinction between statements and expressions, while to my knowledge CoffeeScript does not. "Everything is an expression" is a huge difference in semantics even though nothing has been added.
Let us suppose that languages BE and LE were designed completely independently, but came up with the same semantics in a different syntactic packet. For arguments' sake, let's suppose Google made one and Apple the other. They had different marketing budgets, different logos, different conferences. Religious wars were fought over them. Even though they had identical semantics.
Are they the same language?
Are they the same language?
Why is this downvoted? Seems like a reasonable suggestion, and I don't see the haters suggesting alternative criteria...
I didn't downvote him, but one alternative is that a language is defined by a grammar. Of course you'd want to group certain very similar grammars together as one language (Python 2.x and 3.x), but the grammars of CoffeeScript and JavaScript are significantly different.
That’s also a reasonable definition. Since I didn’t say “if and only if,” both definitions are compatible. By the grammar definition, we could make a language with pure JavaScript semantics but Lisp-ish s-exprs, and it would be a different language as well.
Because it simply compiles down and is executed as Javascript. It doesn't (and can't) change anything but the syntax.
Edit: It does add features like pattern matching and list comprehension, and anything can compile down to js, so I guess it is a separate language.
Edit: It does add features like pattern matching and list comprehension, and anything can compile down to js, so I guess it is a separate language.
I think the difference between syntax and semantics can be quite blurred sometimes. For example, CoffeeScript embraces the "everything is an expression" philosophy and that's a pretty big difference for me compared to plain JS; it affects the way i write -and think about- code in a much deeper way than using indentation instead of braces. So, is the difference between having statements and expressions as different constructs and having only expressions just a syntactic difference?
Another aspect in which CS differs from JS is that it provides built-in classes; which i think can make code written in CS much more consistent compared to JS, where everyone seems to like inventing their own way of writing classes.
And i'm sure i'm forgetting other aspects in which CS differs from JS that i wouldn't consider "just syntactic".
Another aspect in which CS differs from JS is that it provides built-in classes; which i think can make code written in CS much more consistent compared to JS, where everyone seems to like inventing their own way of writing classes.
And i'm sure i'm forgetting other aspects in which CS differs from JS that i wouldn't consider "just syntactic".
By this logic no language is a real language other than JavaScript, since as we've seen, you can make just about anything "simply compile down" to JavaScript.
Let me put it another way. If I were to write a separate runtime that directly executed CoffeeScript (without JS as an intermediate step), would you then be satisfied that it is in fact a real language?
Let me put it another way. If I were to write a separate runtime that directly executed CoffeeScript (without JS as an intermediate step), would you then be satisfied that it is in fact a real language?
Now that you say it, and I think about it more, I guess you're right. It does add features like list comprehension and pattern matching, and the compilation really is ambiguous.
Coffeescript doesn't add pattern matching.
Coffeescript has it, though it's formally called destructuring: http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/#destructuring
destructuring assignment is not really pattern matching, as the latter allows flow control and the former does not.
Ahem. That'd be "destructuring".
http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:destructuring
http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:destructuring
A programming language is independent of its implementation. If web browsers supported CoffeeScript natively, would that make it more of a language?
Having coded in javascript for 4 or so years, and a recent love for NodeJS in a couple of internal projects, I'm a bit torn between giving coffee a proper go or not.
Can any one employee give a gist of how used it is in production? From what I've seen I would love to use coffee (I've actually used coffee in reverse, to tweak out a javascript function), but I'm wondering if I'd be lowering my productivity.
What I mean by that is, if I wrote coffeescript, but everyone else worked in javascript (or compiled coffee), then it'd be silly of me to continue doing so. Similarly I've watched a lot of node module development over the past year, and only once I've come across a module written in coffee.
I do of course realize NodeJS in itself is not "very" widespread yet, but are there any node users who can shed some light on the possible future of coffee in node?
Can any one employee give a gist of how used it is in production? From what I've seen I would love to use coffee (I've actually used coffee in reverse, to tweak out a javascript function), but I'm wondering if I'd be lowering my productivity.
What I mean by that is, if I wrote coffeescript, but everyone else worked in javascript (or compiled coffee), then it'd be silly of me to continue doing so. Similarly I've watched a lot of node module development over the past year, and only once I've come across a module written in coffee.
I do of course realize NodeJS in itself is not "very" widespread yet, but are there any node users who can shed some light on the possible future of coffee in node?
Why are you so cautious to "give it a proper go"? It's not a big mental investment.
Hopefully nodeJs will die within a year or two.
Apart from that, I believe you should try coffeescript or any language you become interested in, it's a very way to keep on improving, opens your mind to different paradigms too.
Apart from that, I believe you should try coffeescript or any language you become interested in, it's a very way to keep on improving, opens your mind to different paradigms too.
Is this just for coffeescript proper or are they counting all the variants of coffeescript as well?
It needs to have the .coffee extension (or two variants): https://github.com/github/linguist/blob/master/lib/linguist/...
Ugh, Coffeescript. Javascript doesn't need any further abstraction, we already have jQuery which made everyone's lives easier but at the same time has created a new-breed of developers who only know jQuery and not Javascript itself. This is the exact same thing, people will know Coffeescript if it takes off further in popularity but won't know Javascript.
That is so sad. I am not a fan of CoffeeScript. The language is like Ruby and When people try to make one language look like another, I don't like it. I probably would have liked it if the syntax was a bit different. It looks more like a ruby propaganda.
Incoming hatred.
Incoming hatred.
This is the weirdest, least substantial criticism I've ever seen of CoffeeScript. Do you hate C for looking like B? Python for looking like a cross between C and ABC? Haskell for looking like ML? Objective-C for looking like both C and Smalltalk? Almost every mainstream language for pretty strongly resembling ALGOL-68? Heck, Ruby itself was intentionally made to look like Perl. Criticizing a language's syntax is often just an expression of personal preference — but criticizing a language for using syntactic conventions that are familiar and generally well-liked? That just makes no sense.
Every language is derivative. C++ looks like C. C# looks like Java. Scheme looks like Lisp. It's OK to stand on the shoulders of giants.
To be honest, CoffeeScript feels a lot more like python than it does Ruby
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