prasincs

I'd expect an article titled Front-end engineer's manifesto to have better UI than this. First thing I assumed was that I could use up, down in my keypad to navigate through slides. Then right, left. Figured scrolling is okay. The sidebar that's supposed to show me how far I've read isn't apparent. The font choices and responsiveness coud be better. Reinventing scrolling isn't good. I'd have been fine if it worked for me on Chrome, it got stuck in page 4 and 5 and I had to press j/k few times to get moving again. If there's a tool that takes care of kind of stuff and frees you to do important stuff, why not use it? On that point, checkout impress.js for this kind of stuff.

The question is how similar? Coffeescript has come a long way in keeping symbols similar enough to be debuggable and not polluting the javascript namespace. Once the code grows to a certain size, tracing from line number in error to a line of code in your source becomes non-trivial.

Also, since this has been a constant pain for me when using Google Closure compiler, how do you anticipate this tool working with existing javascript libraries? Hypothetically, can I port a C# application ( a reasonable/simple one, not with crazy winforms and stuff)? Is there a spec you're adhering to?

I agree. Having had used GWT and other similar cross compiling to javascript type tools, it's often a huge problem in debugging than if you just write a short javascript code. No offense to the author but projects like these that try to fit a static language like Java/C# that run in their own managed environments into dynamic world of Javascript fail miserably.

I fear projects like these tend to attract programmers who know C#, Java but don't quite want to learn javascript and they don't even try to do it once they run out of runway in this tool. And, the code becomes undebuggable, bloated on the browser.

Nothing against other languages, they're amazing at what they do. But, javascript is, for better or worse, the language of browsers. And it's really powerful with established best practices to organize, debug code + great tools (thanks to Chrome Team @ Google and Mozilla).

From a programming languages/compilers standpoint, it definitely tickles my fancy :)

That's a great idea. I think the act of sending paper mail feels rather tedious to those accustomed to using emails, IMs often. People are more likely to use a tool like this if it meant attention to issues. From the perspective of the senators, seeing a stack of 10,000 paper letters is much more tangible than say, 10,000 emails or petitions on a webpage. Now someone needs to make it :)