Coffeescript or Javascript?

I started programming in Coffeescript about 2 years ago because that was what my company used (frontend & backend). I really didn’t like the language at first (coming from a background of C++/C#), but it steadily grew on me. Recently though we are converting much of the server side code to be ES6 since that Node 6+ runs that natively. But is that really needed? Should we really convert? Coffeescript does have its advantages.

• less overall code

  • terse like python & ruby

• no braces

  • ever written a test in mocha that had a few describes & contexts

• everything is an expression

  • ex: color = if color then 'RED' else 'GREEN'

• checking for undefined with ?

  • ex: color = config?.features?.color

But I feel like the disadvantages can put Coffeescript down a little bit.

• debugging

  • can be annoying since the code is not the same

• errors

  • hard to read errors from the compiler

• untyped

  • I’ve had personal problems with untyped languages!
• spaces instead of braces

And competing against ES6 is hard since ES6 has lots of things that are coffeescript has (like destruturing objects). And ES6 has more flexibility with variables (let and const).

I would in conclusion choose ES6 especially if you are in Node 6+ environment, but I’m not a huge fan of dynamic languages so if you can use flow or Typescript then I would highly recommend using one of those technologies alongside ES6.