I am a recent coffeescript convert. When I first heard about coffeescript I dismissed it offhand as a pointless abstraction over javascript, which I judged to a

I am a recent coffeescript convert. When I first heard about coffeescript I dismissed it offhand as a pointless abstraction over javascript, which I judged to already be a high level language. (In retrospect, I am ashamed to say it, but I think that I found the syntax to be intimidating.) I then went on to continue, happily, writing thousands of lines of javascript. Somewhere along the way, I came across Paul Grahams essay "Succinctness is Power" ( http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html ), and I thought about how my productivity could be increased if I had access to a language that offered me the ability to do more with less. That was when I decided to revisit Coffeescript. For my first task, I decided to rewrite some of my simpler javascript code into Coffeescript just to get a feel for it. Initially, the things that had initially repulsed me were somewhat irritating: * The lack of parenthesis and brackets - I doubted that it would be possible to maintain code readability without them * The reliance on indentation * The overall "strangeness" of the appearance of coffeescript code (to someone with a predominantly java background) Here's the thing though. All of those objections are only surface deep. Once I actually started to code in Coffeescript, I found that I became completely comfortable with the syntax. As a matter of fact, I don't think that I could ever go back to conventional javascript again. Especially because I would lose (among other things): * An elegant syntax for writing classes using javascript * List comprehensions * Elegant string interpolation (it's the little things that count) It is easy to be skeptical about coffeescript if you natural lean away from things that are surrounded by hype, but, take it from me, coffeescript really is an extremely valuable tool that no web developer should be without. It is more than just a way to write pretty javascript. It is a powerful, flexible, and elegant language in its own right. Don't be turned off by its syntax, give it a try today!