10 for the long and detailed answer. Couple of things:
1. I've been using web2py in production in my workplace for almost 3 years now, and "admire tha hell outa it". That said, it's not a 'toy' for me. It's a workplace-production tool, and I treat it as such. I appreciate web2py's origins and main vision of Massimo for it to facilitate learning for kids and simplifying and streamlining the learning-curve for building web-apps. I'm with him all the way (and then some...) regarding kids learning to program. However, when it comes to my own production work, I expect it to be there for me just as much. I can, by all means, run node.json all the my dev machines, and even on some server for CI stuff (testing, build-processes, reporting, etc.). I just thought that with these python modules integrated, some of that work could also be streamlined and integrated. Say, integrate it with web2py's existing "cron" and/or the job-queue stuff. 2. Obviously I didn't think that transpiling in the production-environment server is a good idea. But from what I gather, it's not an "either/or scenario"... Some aspects are better done on the (local) server in development-mode, even though it's theoretically possible to do it on the client. I know how to use less.js and coffescript.js, but many say that it's a bad idea, especially for debugging. Tools integration may solve some of that, for example, having your coffeescript "watched" (auto-compiled-on-save) in your IDE, may have additional "js-lint"ingbenefits on-the-fly. The transpiler itself is a form of 'lint'er as it can detect syntax errors that are only detectable in transpiling-time. Having a browser-extension for debugging DSLs is also an exciting possibility, but were not quite there yet, afaik. In any case, having DSL files 'watched', is an important asset to have in development, and it's a "complementary-feature to" and not a "substitution for" the browser-reload feature (that is solved nicely by web2py's static-assets). In fact, browser-auto-reload functionality already exists as browser-extension (at least for chrome), and it wouldn't work very well, I guess, without static-assets. But what I mean is, I think that in the long run, I should not be expected to tun 2 different servers on every dev-machine, just for transpiling, especially when there are these python modules just standing there mocking me... :) --
