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For someone who has little or no experience in JS and CS, how realistic is it to get away without learning JS and skip directly to CS ?
by reinhardt 16y ago
For someone who has little or no experience in JS and CS, how realistic is it to get away without learning JS and skip directly to CS ?
- jashkenas 16y agoNot very realistic. CoffeeScript semantics are nearly identical to JavaScript semantics -- you'll have to understand them.
- mmavnn 16y agoHate to disagree with such a distinguished source, but having done it: Very realistic. Looking at the compiled CoffeeScript taught me more Javascript than all of the tutorials put together, and CoffeeScript itself was a joy to learn. I think you're under estimating your own baby here, jashkenas. I would point out that you're not so much 'skipping' learning JS, as that learning CS is the quickest way I've found so far to learn JS.
- jashkenas 16y agoHey, that's wonderful. I'm just saying that you're not in any way going to avoid learning JS by starting with Coffee -- you still need to know: * How JS numbers work. * All about "this" (dynamic scope). * Function vs. block-level scope. * How the prototype chain is structured. ... and all those other un-obvious things about JavaScript.
- mmavnn 16y agoTrue, but I would need to learn these regardless of which syntax I use to write my JavaScript. And coffee actually helped me to become aware of/understand some of these issues: -> vs. =>, for example, or the prototype code produced by your 'class' syntax.
- nolanw 16y agoVery realistic until you need to debug your code. Debugging's JS-only, as far as I know, so you're picking through the compiled CS looking for errors. edit: Well listen to the man himself, but I learned tons about JS's semantics by picking up (and picking apart) CS.
- jdkoeck 16y agoSpend a couple hours reading "Javascript: The Good Parts" by Douglas Crockford. Read it twice, cover to cover. The other option is to skip learning javascript properly, which I tried... and it came back hard at me when I tried going beyond enhancing my pages with jquery.
- danneu 16y agoI'd say it is realistic for what you're probably trying to do off the bat with Javascript. It's what I did. Since I'm already comfortably with Ruby and CoffeeScript's simple syntax, I used CoffeeScript's "Try CoffeeScript" console to insert Ruby-like code and get the Javascript equivalent. Helped me rapidly map Ruby-Javascript equivalences in my head. Now that I'm quickly comfortable with Javscript's surface and my foot's in the door, diving deeper into the language isn't the obstacle I used to consider it as.