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Like HAML before it, coffeescript is more like 'piglatin with shortcuts' to me, i.e. you have to mentally make a transformation on the javascript you were going
by alinajaf 15y ago
Like HAML before it, coffeescript is more like 'piglatin with shortcuts' to me, i.e. you have to mentally make a transformation on the javascript you were going to write while simultaneously stripping away unnecessary crud.
This is somewhat analogous to the stage in learning a spoken language where you're mentally translating (rather than just articulating directly in the target language). Unlike a spoken language however, in haml/coffeescript this phase only needs to last about an hour, instead of months or years.
P.S. I have a pet theory that bi-linguals are more 'intuitively comfortable' with what I call 'transformation' languages like HAML and Coffeescript, probably because they're used to cross-compiling their own speech while learning their second language. Not based on any scientific research but it appears to play out in my current office.
- knowtheory 15y agoWell, as a linguist and hapa I don't fit your mold very well. I don't like HAML particularly, and I prefer explicit block scoping a la JS and Ruby rather than CS and Python. I do like CoffeeScript though :)
- starwed 15y agoI speak only one language and found it pretty trivial to switch from JS to Coffeescript. I guess it's always possible I have an innate capacity for languages I've never actually developed, though... :P
- crazygringo 15y agoI'm bilingual (English/Portuguese), and use both JavaScript and CoffeeScript. And I'm not "intuitively comfortable" at all with CoffeeScript -- it has nice Python-esque features which I love, but its seemingly arbitrary parsing edge cases drive me mad. But I think that one's comfort with using CoffeeScript depends entirely on their level of comfort and knowledge of Python and JavaScript. I don't feel like linguistic skills have any bearing. But it's an interesting idea!