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CoffeScript had quite a bit of influence on JavaScript and TypeScript today (and/or really great timing w/ similar thinking). All of these were in early release

by nevir 6y ago

CoffeScript had quite a bit of influence on JavaScript and TypeScript today (and/or really great timing w/ similar thinking). All of these were in early releases of CoffeeScript, and showed up in modern JavaScript years later: * fat arrow functions * classes * template strings, multiline strings * destructuring and ...rest values (splatting) * elvis operator (foo?.bar?.baz - in TypeScript) honorable mention * list/iterator comprehensions (made some good progress in the ES speccing process, but ultimately didn't land)

dgoldstein0 6y ago
ah, I forgot coffeescript had destructuring! yes, that is a great feature.
BurningFrog 6y ago
Yeah, is this sense Coffeescript didn't only feel like the future, it was a preview of the future.
wonnage 6y ago
I think it was also a forcing function for a lot of modern development patterns. Bundlers, sourcemaps, even chrome's prettyprint, all became mainstream around the time coffeescript was relevant (~2011?) I think they all existed before then, debugging coffeescript was a huge pain in the ass without them.
dugmartin 6y ago
I agree with some of items on your list but a lot of those features were part of ECMAScript 4 (ES4) which was largely abandoned in 2008 (with the exception of it being the basis of ActionScript 3). CoffeeScript's first commit was December 13, 2009. From the Wikipedia entry ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript#4th_Edition_(abandoned) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript#4th_Edition_(abando... ) --------------- By August 2008, the ECMAScript 4th edition proposal had been scaled back into a project codenamed ECMAScript Harmony. Features under discussion for Harmony at the time included: - classes, - a module system, - optional type annotations and static typing, probably using a structural type system, - generators and iterators, - destructuring assignment, and algebraic data types. --------------- I enjoy working in TypeScript in VSCode since it feels just like working in ActionScript 3 in FlashDevelop. except a bit slower.

by nevir 6y ago

dgoldstein0 6y ago

ah, I forgot coffeescript had destructuring! yes, that is a great feature.

BurningFrog 6y ago

Yeah, is this sense Coffeescript didn't only feel like the future, it was a preview of the future.

wonnage 6y ago

I think it was also a forcing function for a lot of modern development patterns. Bundlers, sourcemaps, even chrome's prettyprint, all became mainstream around the time coffeescript was relevant (~2011?) I think they all existed before then, debugging coffeescript was a huge pain in the ass without them.

dugmartin 6y ago

I agree with some of items on your list but a lot of those features were part of ECMAScript 4 (ES4) which was largely abandoned in 2008 (with the exception of it being the basis of ActionScript 3). CoffeeScript's first commit was December 13, 2009. From the Wikipedia entry ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript#4th_Edition_(abandoned) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript#4th_Edition_(abando... ) --------------- By August 2008, the ECMAScript 4th edition proposal had been scaled back into a project codenamed ECMAScript Harmony. Features under discussion for Harmony at the time included: - classes, - a module system, - optional type annotations and static typing, probably using a structural type system, - generators and iterators, - destructuring assignment, and algebraic data types. --------------- I enjoy working in TypeScript in VSCode since it feels just like working in ActionScript 3 in FlashDevelop. except a bit slower.