Minification is <i>vital</i>. It has been widely reported that an extra 100ms in latency costs Amazon 1% of their sales. Google found that 500ms of extra latency reduced traffic by 20%. Optimising page load time is one of the cheapest and simplest ways of improving user experience and so your business.<p>Sacrificing profits and UX for a few hypothetical developers is lunacy. If you really want to share the wealth and let newbie developers read your source, blog about it or submit it to Github - then you can include explanation of your design and make it far easier for them to get the interesting bits.
This sounds more like an argument for open source. Ignoring efficiency issues, I'd much rather view a JavaScript framework on GitHub than in a View Source window.
If you want to share your code with others, open source it. There's no need to not-minify it so they can see it.<p>I don't see this an an anti-minification argument at all. Instead, it's an argument for open source in disguise.
Here's how I do it: minified versions are used in the site, if someone wants to see my code, they can remove the "min" part:<p>used on site: <a href="http://laserey.es/media/javascripts/base.min.js" rel="nofollow">http://laserey.es/media/javascripts/base.min.js</a><p>non-minified: <a href="http://laserey.es/media/javascripts/base.js" rel="nofollow">http://laserey.es/media/javascripts/base.js</a>
People "learning" by copying, coupled with large popularity, are what gave JavaScript, PHP and Perl such bad reputations. There are tutorials for most of the things newcomers might want to do in JavaScript. As such, I wouldn't place much value in people copying my work when deciding if minification is necessary.<p>I assume we're talking about individual per-site code here, since they can always download non-minified versions of commonly served frameworks easily somewhere else.
Some modern compressors such as YUI Compressor use real JS engine to parse your script and therefore can detect syntax error during minification, I can't see any reason why not using it.