Migrating to JavaScript

[rsandor]

It is pretty clear to me that JavaScript is a much more accessible language for most of the people who might want to help contribute to Epoch. This raises the question: should we migrate the source to JavaScript.

While it wouldn't take an entire rewrite to do so, the way I wrote it originally leaned a lot on CoffeeScripts faux "classical inheritance" class model. I was attempting, at the time, to create more of a charting SDK than a general purpose stand-alone charting library. It is clear to me now that most users would rather it work as the latter rather than the former.

This tends to indicate to me that we simply do not want to do a 1-to-1 translation of the library. Instead we should rethink how it is architected and rebuild it in a way to make it 1) work better as a pure javascript project, and 2) make it as easy as possible for others contribute.

This ticket is an open question to those who are interested, what are your two cents on making a switch to using JavaScript?

[vsrnth]

I'd love the move to javascript. :+1:

[rsandor]

Welp, it should be a pretty simple re-write if we use Babel: https://babeljs.io/docs/learn-es2015/ ES6 has pretty much all of the constructs we rely on in CoffeeScript but just nicer.

[rca]

I've just started my own research on TypeScript in general, so I'm not recommending it, but simply asking what your thoughts on it are.

And, I do realize this question goes against making the project pure JS.

[woozyking]

:+1: for Babel

:+1: :+1: :+1: for re-architecture the project so that new participants like me can get a deeper grasp of the project

[ronakshah725]

It would be good move to migrate source JavaScript.

[dkoffler]

+1 for Javascript

[grodansparadis]

Yes Javascript.