Tech Lore - A Skeptic’s CoffeeScript Experience. When my co-founder Jim first came across CoffeeScript, I was skeptical.
I had picked up all I knew about JavaScript through hard-earned battle scars. I had won the battle, but I wasn’t ready for a new one. It didn’t make sense to apply a new layer of abstraction, with its own warts and idiosyncrasies, on top of a language that had a lifetime of them on its own. But its syntax *was* much closer to what I’d consider ideal, so like a good nerd, I gave it a run around. It’s been incredible. In Which I Tell You to Stop Whining About CoffeeScript - Adam Singer.
CoffeeScript. CoffeeConsole: A Chrome Extension. Harry Brundage, a co-worker of mine at Shopify, does a lot of CoffeeScript development and said he would love to be able to do CoffeeScript right from the console in Chrome's Web Inspector.
I asked Paul Irish, a "dev relations guy" at Google, to point me in the right direction on building just such a thing. The result of today's pet project is CoffeeConsole, a Chrome extension that adds a new panel inside the Web Inspector. Type in any CoffeeScript and then hit the run button (or hit Command-Enter or Shift-Enter). The code will be compiled into JavaScript and then run in the context of the current window. I've put together a quick video to demonstrate this.