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Well it seems your assumption that "pretty" is purely a luxury, something that's nice to have but serves no practical purpose other than aesthetic satisfaction.

Well it seems your assumption that "pretty" is purely a luxury, something that's nice to have but serves no practical purpose other than aesthetic satisfaction. Personally I disagree. I think a programming language is not like a car, at least not in that with a car whether it's pretty or not has no practical effect on the utility of the car. You are using the computer language to express your own ideas, and to formulate your own constructs via it's syntax and semantics. When the language's syntax and semantics are clunky, verbose, and full of line noise....those things become intermingled with your ideas and your semantics and it becomes difficult to separate the two. I've been writing Javascript a long time, and what I like about CS is not only that it makes writing code easier by providing shortcuts for patterns I use constantly, but that the finished code more closely resembles the actual ideas I had when I wrote the code. With syntax and semantics that get out of the way you can focus more closely on your ideas and how to improve or fix them imho.

davepeck 16y ago
My perspective is a little more subtle than that. To clarify: "Pretty" is great -- desirable, even. But if "pretty" comes at the cost of using immature tools that may slow me down, or at the cost of forcing my development team to learn a new syntax just because I believe it's "pretty" -- well, that's a harder value proposition. That's what I'm trying to get at with all this. It sounds like, to you, the level of "pretty" in CoffeeScript outweighs the potential disadvantages -- which is great! I do like the notion that CoffeeScript syntax gets out of the way; that it lays constructs and ideas bare in a way that JavaScript does not.
- alextgordon 16y ago
  This is all anecdotal, but learning CoffeeScript took me no more than a few hours, and I seem to be able to write CoffeeScript faster and with less errors than JavaScript. Obviously YMMV, but it's not just about "pretty".
- detst 16y ago
  Pretty to me is the difference in being excited about writing code and feeling dead inside. Yes, a bit hyperbolic but I really don't like even looking at JS at this point. CS makes me more efficient for this reason and for the improved syntax. I feel the same way about Sass/Compass vs CSS, BTW. How long do you expect it to take your team to learn the syntax? I would expect anyone with JS experience to have this [1] page open and be able to immediately start writing code and have it down in no time. 1. http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/ http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/
  - neimado 16y ago
    I write javascript and I don't feel 'dead inside'. I love writing javascript, and I code all day every day. Just because you hate it doesn't mean it's bad.
- M1573RMU74710N 16y ago
  That's a fair point, and there are a few things I would point out in no particular order: The first is that CoffeeScript is ultimately a sort of dialect of Javascript. CS and JS can interact with eachother seamlessly, so as mentioned in the OP article there's no need to switch over to CS for everything and/or all at once. Another important thing is that where possible CS tries to map relatively directly to JS, so for experienced JS developers they will recognize CS as a series of shortcuts which map to idioms they use constantly. If you are familiar with JS, doing a few small projects in CS should get you pretty familiar with it. CS is obviously somewhat immature, but I think it's reached the point where it can be considered for "serious work". I've found the tooling is pretty decent: coffee is slick with commands like --watch to recompile on changes, and coffee-mode for emacs is nice. There's also CS mode for vim, textmate, gedit, + more. Honestly the main hurdle is potential debugging problems, but I haven't found that to be too difficult either. Being mindful of how CS transforms your code, and strategic debugging code make the process for me not much different from debugging regular JS. So I'd say at this point I don't think CS presents hurdles which are terribly difficult to overcome.

davepeck 16y ago

My perspective is a little more subtle than that. To clarify: "Pretty" is great -- desirable, even. But if "pretty" comes at the cost of using immature tools that may slow me down, or at the cost of forcing my development team to learn a new syntax just because I believe it's "pretty" -- well, that's a harder value proposition. That's what I'm trying to get at with all this. It sounds like, to you, the level of "pretty" in CoffeeScript outweighs the potential disadvantages -- which is great! I do like the notion that CoffeeScript syntax gets out of the way; that it lays constructs and ideas bare in a way that JavaScript does not.

alextgordon 16y ago
This is all anecdotal, but learning CoffeeScript took me no more than a few hours, and I seem to be able to write CoffeeScript faster and with less errors than JavaScript. Obviously YMMV, but it's not just about "pretty".
detst 16y ago
Pretty to me is the difference in being excited about writing code and feeling dead inside. Yes, a bit hyperbolic but I really don't like even looking at JS at this point. CS makes me more efficient for this reason and for the improved syntax. I feel the same way about Sass/Compass vs CSS, BTW. How long do you expect it to take your team to learn the syntax? I would expect anyone with JS experience to have this [1] page open and be able to immediately start writing code and have it down in no time. 1. http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/ http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/
- neimado 16y ago
  I write javascript and I don't feel 'dead inside'. I love writing javascript, and I code all day every day. Just because you hate it doesn't mean it's bad.
M1573RMU74710N 16y ago
That's a fair point, and there are a few things I would point out in no particular order: The first is that CoffeeScript is ultimately a sort of dialect of Javascript. CS and JS can interact with eachother seamlessly, so as mentioned in the OP article there's no need to switch over to CS for everything and/or all at once. Another important thing is that where possible CS tries to map relatively directly to JS, so for experienced JS developers they will recognize CS as a series of shortcuts which map to idioms they use constantly. If you are familiar with JS, doing a few small projects in CS should get you pretty familiar with it. CS is obviously somewhat immature, but I think it's reached the point where it can be considered for "serious work". I've found the tooling is pretty decent: coffee is slick with commands like --watch to recompile on changes, and coffee-mode for emacs is nice. There's also CS mode for vim, textmate, gedit, + more. Honestly the main hurdle is potential debugging problems, but I haven't found that to be too difficult either. Being mindful of how CS transforms your code, and strategic debugging code make the process for me not much different from debugging regular JS. So I'd say at this point I don't think CS presents hurdles which are terribly difficult to overcome.