Not sure why it needs the sensationalist title if the author's underlying point is simply that Coffeescript is a pretty good tool for writing nicely patterned Javascript and not a language in and of itself. I guess it is a marketing ploy. I expect it will work.
I usually write these sort of titles because they amuse me rather than in the extreme hope of linkbaiting. I accept that writing for my own amusement has about as much value for others as laughing at my own jokes.
It is a bit of a bait and switch, you don't let people know that you think it is a "damn good tool" until towards the end. I'm ultimately neutral on this. It sort of works to keep your audience engaged with your writing, but is a bit of a cheap trick to not put all your cards on the table until the end of the article.
Oh, and when you are writing you are almost always writing for an audience -- esp. when you tweet the result right afterwards and show up on Hacker News to discuss it.
I see that in addition to choosing a title that displeased you, in responding to you I failed to make it obvious that I agreed with you somewhat. I didn’t say I don’t write for an audience, I said that I selected the title for my own amusement, and that it would be better in some ways to refrain from enjoying my own little joke.
For what it's worth, I saw the title on HN, then saw that it was a link to your githublogthing and guessed "aw, he's going to be cheeky and turn it around in the post by interpreting it literally." So I thought the title was clever.
I like the title. It's based on a quote. I think it will get people to read it, sure, but it will also get people to remember it, as well as the Perlis quote. It's also fun to guess what the contents of the article will be. Partly because I knew raganwald liked CoffeeScript all right, I solved that riddle before reading it.
