TrevorBurnham
Joined 18 years ago
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1,926
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389
Member since
Sep 14
Recent submissions
Comment · 13 years ago
Congratulations on launching! I applied to YC a few years ago with a similar concept. Your site looks gorgeous, and I'm excited to see it develop. I hope you succeed in disrupting a space that's been neglected for far too long.
Comment · 14 years ago
I believe the company talbina's thinking of is mine: We applied as Theoryville, got interviewed, got rejected, applied to Betaspring (http://betaspring.com/), got accepted, changed our name to DataBraid, and proceeded to fall apart over the course of a summer.
I do think the idea has a lot of potential, and what StatWing has built is already more complete than what my team managed to build in 3 months. A few suggestions I'd offer based on that experience:
1. Parsing CSVs is easy in theory, but painful in practice, because CSVs in the wild tend to be full of junk. I would provide a JSON API that makes it easy for developers to put data in your system directly, allowing people to build their own CSV parsers for you.
2. Use GitHub as your model. You want people to collaborate around data the same way that developers collaborate around code. Just about every day when I was doing DataBraid, we'd discuss a use case and then say "Oh, GitHub already figured out the right way to do this." The most compelling use case here is that researchers can run different sets of tests on the same data and discuss which approach is the most valid/insightful.
3. Getting to revenue will be hard, but having paying customers will make it much, much easier to attract investment. So find the MVP that people will pay for and put everything else on a "nice-to-have" list.
Best of luck!
Comment · 14 years ago
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.
Comment · 14 years ago
This is an excellent idea, and is the goal of a project that Google announced at JSConf 2011 with much fanfare (some of it from Brendan Eich himself), Traceur: http://code.google.com/p/traceur-compiler/
However, Traceur has gained little traction. With the announcement of Dart, it's clear that Google's heart isn't really into the project.
See also: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6506519/ecmascriptharmony...
Comment · 14 years ago
What's really nice about the compiler being in JavaScript is that you can run JavaScript anywhere: in the browser, on any OS, embedded in any major web framework. If the compiler were written in any other language, you'd have to worry about dependencies.
This applies to HTML and CSS preprocessors as well: I'd advocate Jade over Haml and Stylus or Less over Sass, simply because Jade and Stylus/Less aren't tied to the Ruby ecosystem. JS is the real deal for "Write Once, Run Anywhere."
Comment · 14 years ago
That's a good idea. Michael, you should look into doing a run of CoffeeScript coffee mugs. These ones were much-loved and are no longer available: http://www.etsy.com/listing/93595042/coffeescript-mug
Comment · 14 years ago
I'm pledging $1,000 to this. As the author of the PragProg book on CoffeeScript (http://pragprog.com/book/tbcoffee/coffeescript), I have a stake in making CoffeeScript a more mainstream tool, and I believe that Michael's project will greatly advance this cause.
The use of CoffeeScript has become fairly widespread at startups (GitHub, 37signals, many YC alums...) but not in larger enterprises. One reason for this is that debugging CoffeeScript requires a "hacker mentality": compile-time errors are often reported with minimal or misleading explanations (e.g. "Unexpected ," when there is no comma on the line, but rather an implicit comma from whitespace); run-time errors have to be manually traced from the compiled JS to the original CoffeeScript.
These flaws are likely to be ameliorated gradually (Jeremy has stated that Source Map support is the primary goal for CoffeeScript 1.4), but this project could improve the debugging situation dramatically in a matter of months. I hope the CoffeeScript community will lend Michael their support.
Comment · 14 years ago
Looks like the REPL is still affected, though: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/1829#issue...
Comment · 14 years ago
I'm the author, ask me anything.
This is my second book; the first was http://pragprog.com/book/tbcoffee/coffeescript.
I ran a Kickstarter in February to try to attract advance buzz: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/869786663/async-javascri...
Comment · 14 years ago
Not a very good deal, given Codeschool's $25/month unlimited access membership plan.
Comment · 14 years ago
More CoffeeScript consoles are always welcome, but this one isn't very intuitive. The minimalism goes too far; you have to mouse over the logo just to see the instructions. Also, isn't CTRL+X spoken for (as "cut") on non-Mac systems?
Comment · 14 years ago
SEEKING WORK – Boston or Remote
Buzzwords: JavaScript, CoffeeScript, jQuery, Backbone.js, Node.js.
Author of the PragProg book on CoffeeScript and a forthcoming book on Async JavaScript. Interested in solving JavaScript problems and architecting client-side applications.
And, recently, Async JavaScript: http://leanpub.com/asyncjs
I'm available for freelance work on exceptionally interesting projects. I live in Cambridge, MA.
Website: http://trevorburnham.com/
Email: [email protected]