13 ms·

CoffeeScript's Time is Waning For Me

27 points by bpierre 13y ago

omni 13y ago
"As my project grows in size, significant whitespace becomes more and more of a problem. It’s just plain not readable or visually parsable. Your files become a wall of dense text. Damn you Python, damn you to hell!" I would appreciate an explanation of this paragraph. How exactly does project size compound issues with significant whitespace? Are you indenting five levels or something?
- elwell 13y ago
  I would agree that the indentation in CoffeeScript causes confusion, especially since the recommended size is 2 spaces.
  - anko 13y ago
    I don't know any worthwhile editor that can't show tabs.
  - tghw 13y ago
    I don't think indentation is a problem particularly. Once you're familiar with languages that use it, e.g. Python, it gets pretty natural. I did run into problems with the 2 space indentation, however, because with certain character combinations, it's difficult without a second look to be sure. I would argue there are bigger problems with CoffeeScript, such as empty blocks being legal. For example: if foo bar() Is totally legal. But 99% of the time, you really mean: if foo bar() In Python, the former is a syntax error and there is an explicit pass call to demonstrate that the block is empty. But in coffeescript, it's easy to accidentally write that code and it looks right when you're doing a quick read through. Again, I think 4 spaces would help as you would be expecting a larger indentation.
    - rmrfrmrf 13y ago
      That's not legal in CoffeeScript either. I just tried it on the CS website and got the message "ERROR ON LINE 1: UNEXPECTED POST_IF".
      - tghw 13y ago
        That might be new. We definitely had a bug in earlier versions of Trello due to that, so it stuck out in my mind as one of the places that Python did it better.
  - elwell 13y ago
    Does anyone know of any text editors that have vertically spanning highlight bar to show clearly where your cursor x-position is from the bottom of the page up to the top? I think it would help with matching up indentation especially in CoffeeScript.
- bengotow 13y ago
  I'm curious about this statement as well. It sounds like the author might be: - Creating big complex methods instead of breaking code into smaller (testable) ones? - Nesting callbacks multiple levels deep, instead of using something like Node Async to flatten out code flow? - Choosing a Coffeescript code style that leads him to put callbacks on their own line, or something like that? - Something else? Not implying the author is wrong by any means - there are probably some scenarios where coffeescript isn't the best whitespace-wise. The thing is, readability is one of the huge reasons I use coffeescript, and I feel like it's largely compatible with the whitespace patterns I used in javascript. Even for large NodeJS or Angular projects, I've found that it is consistently easier to read and edit than Javascript.
  - city41 13y ago
    I'm the author of the blog post. Significant whitespace is pretty dividing, and really boils down to preference. I have a strong dislike for it, and have avoided any language with it, CoffeeScript being the only exception. Here is a typical snippet of my code as seen in my editor: http://i.imgur.com/2yVhgcz.png http://i.imgur.com/2yVhgcz.png IMO, those four methods really bleed together and are hard to discern, not to mention the if statements. I also think for the most part I stick with code that's "whitespace friendly", getAll there is a really long method by my standards. Yeah, I could put more blank lines between the methods and probably some other things. But I also think a closing brace or an 'end' makes a world of difference. Really helps break up the space and compartmentalize it. Not everyone thinks this of course. For many code like this is just fine. Like I said, it's all preference.
    - suchow 13y ago
      Try removing the indentation guides or decreasing their contrast so that they are just barely visible. They appear to cause strong visual grouping between code blocks and make it harder to see what's what.
      - city41 13y ago
        That's a fair point. I will try that and maybe some more tweaks too.
- jarrett 13y ago
  I did find that odd. Whitespace helps you get away from "a wall of dense text." I'm not clear on how mandatory whitespace could exacerbate the "wall of dense text" problem. Does the author want to skip the indentation some of the time? I can think of a few marginal cases where that would be preferable. But in the vast majority of cases, you should indent any nested structure that has its own line(s). Indentation is essential for readability.
  - flywheel 13y ago
    It's really really simple. Significant whitespace has no punctuation to visually queue the reader of the code as to where things begin and end. It is much easier to read Javascript than Coffeescript because well written Javascript includes curly brackets, and other delimiting characters to aid in reading the code. Coffeescript and significant whitespace eschew delimiters for indentation and other gimmicks, and the end result is something that is more difficult to read. I totally agree with the author on this fact. I only see a "wall of dense text" when I read coffeescript, and when I read Javascript it is much easier to parse.
- zachwill 13y ago
  I'd really like further explanation, too. If you're not properly indenting code in large projects — whatever the programming language is — I'd really hate working with you.
- fat0wl 13y ago
  just want to drop another vote against against significant whitespace... i find it slows down my coding because rather than coding & then quickly tidying i instead have to obsess over this tidying at every step or the code won't work in the first place. I find it more efficient to do the code grouping as a "post-POC" task (or when things are starting to look confusing) and to leave the visual look to my discretion. I feel like whitespace languages are kindof subliminally forcing you toward 1 code style. There are some complex functions that look better to me certain ways -- specifically in cases where a group of commands are essentially executing one simple function. Once they work they can be forgotten & the programmer can de-emphasize them in some way according to taste anyway, I am not a CoffeeScript guy. I've been avoiding it and waiting for Dart or something like that to take hold, since I'd like to see some serious language benefits if I'm going to have to introduce a compilation step. It's one of those things I remain slightly bitter about because some shops judge you for not being into it (as well as Sass, Haml) even though they offer negligible benefits for many projects. That said, I can imagine cases where CoffeeScript would offer significant benefits (they are right there in the tutorials) but I haven't really found those types of situations too much in the wild (tons of array math etc.), and if so they can often be simplified via jQuery or the like anyway. So yea if it works for you, great, but I am glad whitespace syntax is not de-facto in the js world. I think js should remain as Java is -- other languages can be built on top of it with their own syntax types but developers still have the choice to ignore these supposed advancements & cherry-pick the ones they like (in my case progress in pure js + Dart will be where i focus my learning).
  - subsection1h 13y ago
    > i instead have to obsess over this tidying I don't mean this as a personal attack, but your comment contains plenty of spelling errors, incorrect punctuation and capitalization, and inconsistency (e.g., use of both "&" and "and"). In my experience, people who aren't careful with syntax tend to detest significant white space, which is understandable.
- reeses 13y ago
  Anyone who has maintained Makefiles will have a strong opinion on semantic whitespace. Maybe not opinion, but reaction. Generally involving visceral fear or anger. It's not that it's always bad, every hour of every day. It's that one time, at 1am, when you shouldn't be working but you are, something doesn't behave properly, and it turns out Bob the Intern re-indented a block of code to use tabs instead of spaces[1], but you couldn't see it because your editor is configured to use four spaces per tab and your coding standards dictate four spaces per level of scope. [1] Why are you using spaces anyway, you complete and utter savage?
  - aiiane 13y ago
    Which is why you set your editor to use something other than the same number of spaces as your indent levels. It works especially well if one isn't a multiple of the other - e.g. having the editor display tabs as 5-space width.
  - read 13y ago
    Anyone who has maintained Makefiles will also have a strong opinion on compiled languages.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
elwell 13y ago
> If you’re contributing to the JS community, you’re better off writing in JavaScript. More people will contribute and/or adopt your code. Quality, not quantity. Maybe the higher quality contributors are more likely to get excited about a cs project over js.
- kansface 13y ago
  Maybe, but many JS programmers won't touch anything CS.
  - elwell 13y ago
    http://js2coffee.org/ http://js2coffee.org/ /s
- spion 13y ago
  Initially I got excited about CS, until I discovered that it forbids shadowing and conflates variable declaration with assignment at the same time, leading to random bugs happening all over the place as I introduce a name that I've used somewhere in a deeper scope. No, identifier names are one of the big problems of all languages and CS gives you even less name locality. Bad.
  - ricardobeat 13y ago
    I found it helps clear up your naming habits and avoid short names, which are a major source of opaqueness in code.
    - spion 13y ago
      On the contrary, short names are a source of clarity and expressiveness. Humans convey so much information through context, and shadowing nicely allows us to at least approximate that. But I would be okay with this stance (yet would not use coffeescript) if the language had a mechanism to warn you when you're trying to reuse a name. Instead the language's features combine in a way that will clobber your code and lead to subtle or not-so-subtle bugs.
kodablah 13y ago
Unlike the author, I love significant whitespace and am enjoying nimrod lately with it. I'd love to see a CoffeeScript variant for TypeScript. TypeScript has the structural things of CoffeeScript and more (OO paradigms, member visibility, modules, typing, etc) but much more verbose. I have tinkered w/ the CoffeeScript grammar/parser adding in a backslash to denote to type (e.g. "(x\int) -> x * x") and the TypeScript AST and compiler are very easy to work with. I just haven't had the enthusiasm to build a complete project. That would be my dream language. Until then I think scala.js is a great fit.
- ilaksh 13y ago
  I love CoffeeScript and am excited about nimrod, but I don't see the point of TypeScript. Honestly I am fairly certain that it was largely created by Microsoft as part of the EEE strategy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish) since the main advantage of JavaScript is not having to supply types.
  - ahoge 13y ago
    > since the main advantage of JavaScript is not having to supply types. With TypeScript and Dart, the type annotations are optional. You don't have to use them. With JavaScript, you can't add any type information. Using non-standard doc comments is the only option. Also, the main advantage of JavaScript is that it's available in browsers.
  - kodablah 13y ago
    I disagree. TypeScript not only attempts to be inline w/ upcoming ES/Harmony standards, but it is not pushed on you in any way. It's Apache licensed and it's not like MS is putting a TypeScript VM in their browser. I love TypeScript's typing system, especially type declarations which are based on whether something has something vs on its named type (i.e. duck typing). There are many editors from MS's free VS express to WebStorm plugins to event IDE's written in TypeScript themselves. I find the language work by MS these days (this, f#, etc) to be really community friendly as opposed to locking in. Re "main advantage of JavaScript is not having to supply types", I am a static typing fanatic so I am just going to disagree here and spare everyone the religious (or as Yegge would say, political) war.
jgalt212 13y ago
I don't do a ton of js programming, but I did poke around with cs a bit. For me, clean iteration seemed like the biggest win. And then I discovered underscore/lodash. So I don't do as much cs anymore. Essentially, js isn't all that busted. The busted parts can for the most part be worked around with underscore/lodash and sweet.js (for the really ambitious) sweet.js http://sweetjs.org/ http://sweetjs.org/ pretty neat pattern matching library written with sweet.js https://github.com/natefaubion/sparkler https://github.com/natefaubion/sparkler I do most of my work in Python, so the above experiences and biases may be a direct result thereof.
krallja 13y ago
I avoided learning the fashionable thing for so long, now I'm fashionable!
lucisferre 13y ago
I have similar issues with coffescript, specifically the pain of significant whitespace is noticable whenever I find myself recalling how to write a simple `setTimeout` (or any similarly structured function) calls correctly, which is pretty much every time I use one as I don't find it particularly natural or intuitive. Personally, though I'm looking at Dart rather than ES6.
- ilaksh 13y ago
  This is how I do setTimeout: delay = (ms, func) -> setTimeout func, ms So you can write it like this: delay 100, -> console.log "100 ms passed"
  - lucisferre 13y ago
    The problem is it isn't the only situation this comes up in, and the fact that this has to be done at all is a testament to the problems with adding significant whitespace to a language not completely designed for it.
lucidrains 13y ago
I hope coffeescript supports generators.
- tdumitrescu 13y ago
  coming soon: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/pull/3240 https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/pull/3240
rmrfrmrf 13y ago
The author uses CoffeeScript for completely different reasons than I do. While a lot of the convenience features of CoffeeScript are awesome, I use CoffeeScript more to compile JS to standards-compliant, consistent code. Variables are hoisted, commas are automatically inserted, semi-colons are taken care of, and the entire script is put into a lovely self-invoking function that helps fool-proof things. Furthermore, because CoffeeScript requires (sort of) a compilation step, errors are caught and debugging becomes MUCH easier than it ever was with plain JavaScript. Most text editors now have plugins that will compile selected text to JavaScript so you can preview the end result and make sure that you're getting the output you want. The better part? When JavaScript best practices evolve, CoffeeScript can evolve with it, but the code can more-or-less stay the same. Awesome!
- jbeja 13y ago
  I couldn't agree more.
jbeja 13y ago
I literally stop reading when he start whi..talking about hate on significant whitespace.
- elwell 13y ago
  I literally hit downvote when he start whi..talking about whi..talking about hate on significant whitespace.
  - jbeja 13y ago
    Unlike the whitespace in my code, your downvote is insignificant to me.
brianchu 13y ago
Also relevant: a big question is how CoffeeScript is going to deal with ES6 and the overlapping syntax between ES6 and CS, which may involve breaking backwards compatibility or leaving out ES6 features. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078969 jashkenas > So in general, what I'd like to see mainline CoffeeScript do, is adopt useful ES6, ES7, and ES8 features, as soon as they land in enough platforms/browsers to be widely useful (yield may be at this point already, or very soon), and to continue to try and find a pleasing minimalist syntax for writing and reading them. If this means taking the ES* syntax wholesale, that's fine. If it means minting a new (and hopefully, but arguably, nicer) syntax, that's fine too. And if it means breaking backwards compatibility, that's also alright, as the compiled lowest-common-denominator JS output will still be perfectly compatible with the new stuff.
pikachu_is_cool 13y ago
I gave CoffeeScript a shot, and frankly I don't like these JS "wrapper" languages. First of all if you want anyone else to help you with your code its likely that they don't know the wrapper's syntax and will have to waste a bunch of time learning it. My boss got super excited about it when it first came out and it just caused a lot of headache and wasted time. First I (and all my coworkers) had to learn the language, and then port all of our existing code to CoffeScript. And for what? Some syntax sugar? Honestly, I don't really see any problems with Javascript's syntax. It's everything else.
- subsection1h 13y ago
  > will have to waste a bunch of time learning it. Please define "bunch of time". I'm having trouble imagining how learning CoffeeScript would require more than a couple of hours for an experienced developer.
  - pikachu_is_cool 13y ago
    A couple of hours is a quite a bit of time IMO. Especially if there's alot of people that need to learn the language.
    - pikachu_is_cool 13y ago
      I mean, obviously a few hours isn't honestly that much. But in terms of the actual benefit you're getting by learning CS makes it not worth it at all. Workflow improvements are negligible (if anything, it probably worsens your workflow because of the extra compilation step). There's no compelling performance enhancement. You aren't getting any real benefit from learning CoffeeScript other than some feel-good syntactical sugar.
bookface 13y ago
Can anybody explain some good use cases of implicit return? When I was doing a project in CoffeeScript last year (the only time I've used it), I found myself just using the return keyword explicitly because it was more readable, and I never ran into the issue the article talks about where it can be bad to accidentally return something from a function that should return null/undefined. When would implicit return make code better? Maybe I'm answering my own question, but I can see them being more readable to somebody coming from a Haskell or LISP background than to somebody like me who has worked mostly in C, Java, and Python.
- mcphage 13y ago
  > I can see them being more readable to somebody coming from a Haskell or LISP background than to somebody like me who has worked mostly in C, Java, and Python Ruby also has explicit returns. The idea is, every statement is an expression, and so has a return value. You don't need to figure out about whether a statement does or not, it just always does. One less thing to have to think about. Other things, too, but that's one that that sticks out for me.
ahoge 13y ago
> [tooling] is perfect with JavaScript Tooling is terrible with JavaScript. Even if you use something like Tern, it's still really bad. You can pass arbitrary arguments to functions. Types and arity isn't checked. Optional positional/named arguments (with default values) don't exist. Passing some options object and "foo = foo || 5" is the best you can do. You can't tell, with absolute certainty, that some object doesn't have some particular property. A string might have a "lenght" property (should have been "length", that was a typo). Your IDE can make some educated guesses and offer some auto-complete suggestions based on that. There is also type coercion. Maybe you really wanted to create NaN in a very elaborate manner. Multiplying some array with some object is totally legit. No squiggly line for that. That's a far cry from being perfect. Never used something like C# or Java? Dart's tooling is also pretty good, for example. Even AS3 offers much better tooling than JS. TypeScript does of course also offer way better tooling. JavaScript's tooling is terrible, really.
- city41 13y ago
  My point is JS tools work with JS as intended, and work with CS to varying degrees of success and with a variety of ways they handle CS. I was a C# developer for many years, so I know what I'm missing.
AdrianRossouw 13y ago
the only thing from coffeescript i think i will end up really missing is switch expressions. When used with conditional assignment it makes for code that is far prettier and more concise than nested if-then-else chains. [1] https://gist.github.com/Vertice/ac357533da976990dc4d https://gist.github.com/Vertice/ac357533da976990dc4d
laureny 13y ago
CoffeeScript is waning for me as well but not for the same reason: Dart and/or Typescript seem to be superior solutions, both backed by companies that are going to keep their language alive for a very long time. I'm curious which one will emerge, though.

27 points by bpierre 13y ago

omni 13y ago

"As my project grows in size, significant whitespace becomes more and more of a problem. It’s just plain not readable or visually parsable. Your files become a wall of dense text. Damn you Python, damn you to hell!" I would appreciate an explanation of this paragraph. How exactly does project size compound issues with significant whitespace? Are you indenting five levels or something?

elwell 13y ago
I would agree that the indentation in CoffeeScript causes confusion, especially since the recommended size is 2 spaces.
- anko 13y ago
  I don't know any worthwhile editor that can't show tabs.
- tghw 13y ago
  I don't think indentation is a problem particularly. Once you're familiar with languages that use it, e.g. Python, it gets pretty natural. I did run into problems with the 2 space indentation, however, because with certain character combinations, it's difficult without a second look to be sure. I would argue there are bigger problems with CoffeeScript, such as empty blocks being legal. For example: if foo bar() Is totally legal. But 99% of the time, you really mean: if foo bar() In Python, the former is a syntax error and there is an explicit pass call to demonstrate that the block is empty. But in coffeescript, it's easy to accidentally write that code and it looks right when you're doing a quick read through. Again, I think 4 spaces would help as you would be expecting a larger indentation.
  - rmrfrmrf 13y ago
    That's not legal in CoffeeScript either. I just tried it on the CS website and got the message "ERROR ON LINE 1: UNEXPECTED POST_IF".
    - tghw 13y ago
      That might be new. We definitely had a bug in earlier versions of Trello due to that, so it stuck out in my mind as one of the places that Python did it better.
- elwell 13y ago
  Does anyone know of any text editors that have vertically spanning highlight bar to show clearly where your cursor x-position is from the bottom of the page up to the top? I think it would help with matching up indentation especially in CoffeeScript.
bengotow 13y ago
I'm curious about this statement as well. It sounds like the author might be: - Creating big complex methods instead of breaking code into smaller (testable) ones? - Nesting callbacks multiple levels deep, instead of using something like Node Async to flatten out code flow? - Choosing a Coffeescript code style that leads him to put callbacks on their own line, or something like that? - Something else? Not implying the author is wrong by any means - there are probably some scenarios where coffeescript isn't the best whitespace-wise. The thing is, readability is one of the huge reasons I use coffeescript, and I feel like it's largely compatible with the whitespace patterns I used in javascript. Even for large NodeJS or Angular projects, I've found that it is consistently easier to read and edit than Javascript.
- city41 13y ago
  I'm the author of the blog post. Significant whitespace is pretty dividing, and really boils down to preference. I have a strong dislike for it, and have avoided any language with it, CoffeeScript being the only exception. Here is a typical snippet of my code as seen in my editor: http://i.imgur.com/2yVhgcz.png http://i.imgur.com/2yVhgcz.png IMO, those four methods really bleed together and are hard to discern, not to mention the if statements. I also think for the most part I stick with code that's "whitespace friendly", getAll there is a really long method by my standards. Yeah, I could put more blank lines between the methods and probably some other things. But I also think a closing brace or an 'end' makes a world of difference. Really helps break up the space and compartmentalize it. Not everyone thinks this of course. For many code like this is just fine. Like I said, it's all preference.
  - suchow 13y ago
    Try removing the indentation guides or decreasing their contrast so that they are just barely visible. They appear to cause strong visual grouping between code blocks and make it harder to see what's what.
    - city41 13y ago
      That's a fair point. I will try that and maybe some more tweaks too.
jarrett 13y ago
I did find that odd. Whitespace helps you get away from "a wall of dense text." I'm not clear on how mandatory whitespace could exacerbate the "wall of dense text" problem. Does the author want to skip the indentation some of the time? I can think of a few marginal cases where that would be preferable. But in the vast majority of cases, you should indent any nested structure that has its own line(s). Indentation is essential for readability.
- flywheel 13y ago
  It's really really simple. Significant whitespace has no punctuation to visually queue the reader of the code as to where things begin and end. It is much easier to read Javascript than Coffeescript because well written Javascript includes curly brackets, and other delimiting characters to aid in reading the code. Coffeescript and significant whitespace eschew delimiters for indentation and other gimmicks, and the end result is something that is more difficult to read. I totally agree with the author on this fact. I only see a "wall of dense text" when I read coffeescript, and when I read Javascript it is much easier to parse.
zachwill 13y ago
I'd really like further explanation, too. If you're not properly indenting code in large projects — whatever the programming language is — I'd really hate working with you.
fat0wl 13y ago
just want to drop another vote against against significant whitespace... i find it slows down my coding because rather than coding & then quickly tidying i instead have to obsess over this tidying at every step or the code won't work in the first place. I find it more efficient to do the code grouping as a "post-POC" task (or when things are starting to look confusing) and to leave the visual look to my discretion. I feel like whitespace languages are kindof subliminally forcing you toward 1 code style. There are some complex functions that look better to me certain ways -- specifically in cases where a group of commands are essentially executing one simple function. Once they work they can be forgotten & the programmer can de-emphasize them in some way according to taste anyway, I am not a CoffeeScript guy. I've been avoiding it and waiting for Dart or something like that to take hold, since I'd like to see some serious language benefits if I'm going to have to introduce a compilation step. It's one of those things I remain slightly bitter about because some shops judge you for not being into it (as well as Sass, Haml) even though they offer negligible benefits for many projects. That said, I can imagine cases where CoffeeScript would offer significant benefits (they are right there in the tutorials) but I haven't really found those types of situations too much in the wild (tons of array math etc.), and if so they can often be simplified via jQuery or the like anyway. So yea if it works for you, great, but I am glad whitespace syntax is not de-facto in the js world. I think js should remain as Java is -- other languages can be built on top of it with their own syntax types but developers still have the choice to ignore these supposed advancements & cherry-pick the ones they like (in my case progress in pure js + Dart will be where i focus my learning).
- subsection1h 13y ago
  > i instead have to obsess over this tidying I don't mean this as a personal attack, but your comment contains plenty of spelling errors, incorrect punctuation and capitalization, and inconsistency (e.g., use of both "&" and "and"). In my experience, people who aren't careful with syntax tend to detest significant white space, which is understandable.
reeses 13y ago
Anyone who has maintained Makefiles will have a strong opinion on semantic whitespace. Maybe not opinion, but reaction. Generally involving visceral fear or anger. It's not that it's always bad, every hour of every day. It's that one time, at 1am, when you shouldn't be working but you are, something doesn't behave properly, and it turns out Bob the Intern re-indented a block of code to use tabs instead of spaces[1], but you couldn't see it because your editor is configured to use four spaces per tab and your coding standards dictate four spaces per level of scope. [1] Why are you using spaces anyway, you complete and utter savage?
- aiiane 13y ago
  Which is why you set your editor to use something other than the same number of spaces as your indent levels. It works especially well if one isn't a multiple of the other - e.g. having the editor display tabs as 5-space width.
- read 13y ago
  Anyone who has maintained Makefiles will also have a strong opinion on compiled languages.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

elwell 13y ago

> If you’re contributing to the JS community, you’re better off writing in JavaScript. More people will contribute and/or adopt your code. Quality, not quantity. Maybe the higher quality contributors are more likely to get excited about a cs project over js.

kansface 13y ago
Maybe, but many JS programmers won't touch anything CS.
- elwell 13y ago
  http://js2coffee.org/ http://js2coffee.org/ /s
spion 13y ago
Initially I got excited about CS, until I discovered that it forbids shadowing and conflates variable declaration with assignment at the same time, leading to random bugs happening all over the place as I introduce a name that I've used somewhere in a deeper scope. No, identifier names are one of the big problems of all languages and CS gives you even less name locality. Bad.
- ricardobeat 13y ago
  I found it helps clear up your naming habits and avoid short names, which are a major source of opaqueness in code.
  - spion 13y ago
    On the contrary, short names are a source of clarity and expressiveness. Humans convey so much information through context, and shadowing nicely allows us to at least approximate that. But I would be okay with this stance (yet would not use coffeescript) if the language had a mechanism to warn you when you're trying to reuse a name. Instead the language's features combine in a way that will clobber your code and lead to subtle or not-so-subtle bugs.

kodablah 13y ago

Unlike the author, I love significant whitespace and am enjoying nimrod lately with it. I'd love to see a CoffeeScript variant for TypeScript. TypeScript has the structural things of CoffeeScript and more (OO paradigms, member visibility, modules, typing, etc) but much more verbose. I have tinkered w/ the CoffeeScript grammar/parser adding in a backslash to denote to type (e.g. "(x\int) -> x * x") and the TypeScript AST and compiler are very easy to work with. I just haven't had the enthusiasm to build a complete project. That would be my dream language. Until then I think scala.js is a great fit.

ilaksh 13y ago
I love CoffeeScript and am excited about nimrod, but I don't see the point of TypeScript. Honestly I am fairly certain that it was largely created by Microsoft as part of the EEE strategy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish) since the main advantage of JavaScript is not having to supply types.
- ahoge 13y ago
  > since the main advantage of JavaScript is not having to supply types. With TypeScript and Dart, the type annotations are optional. You don't have to use them. With JavaScript, you can't add any type information. Using non-standard doc comments is the only option. Also, the main advantage of JavaScript is that it's available in browsers.
- kodablah 13y ago
  I disagree. TypeScript not only attempts to be inline w/ upcoming ES/Harmony standards, but it is not pushed on you in any way. It's Apache licensed and it's not like MS is putting a TypeScript VM in their browser. I love TypeScript's typing system, especially type declarations which are based on whether something has something vs on its named type (i.e. duck typing). There are many editors from MS's free VS express to WebStorm plugins to event IDE's written in TypeScript themselves. I find the language work by MS these days (this, f#, etc) to be really community friendly as opposed to locking in. Re "main advantage of JavaScript is not having to supply types", I am a static typing fanatic so I am just going to disagree here and spare everyone the religious (or as Yegge would say, political) war.

jgalt212 13y ago

I don't do a ton of js programming, but I did poke around with cs a bit. For me, clean iteration seemed like the biggest win. And then I discovered underscore/lodash. So I don't do as much cs anymore. Essentially, js isn't all that busted. The busted parts can for the most part be worked around with underscore/lodash and sweet.js (for the really ambitious) sweet.js http://sweetjs.org/ http://sweetjs.org/ pretty neat pattern matching library written with sweet.js https://github.com/natefaubion/sparkler https://github.com/natefaubion/sparkler I do most of my work in Python, so the above experiences and biases may be a direct result thereof.

krallja 13y ago

I avoided learning the fashionable thing for so long, now I'm fashionable!

lucisferre 13y ago

I have similar issues with coffescript, specifically the pain of significant whitespace is noticable whenever I find myself recalling how to write a simple `setTimeout` (or any similarly structured function) calls correctly, which is pretty much every time I use one as I don't find it particularly natural or intuitive. Personally, though I'm looking at Dart rather than ES6.

ilaksh 13y ago
This is how I do setTimeout: delay = (ms, func) -> setTimeout func, ms So you can write it like this: delay 100, -> console.log "100 ms passed"
- lucisferre 13y ago
  The problem is it isn't the only situation this comes up in, and the fact that this has to be done at all is a testament to the problems with adding significant whitespace to a language not completely designed for it.

lucidrains 13y ago

I hope coffeescript supports generators.

tdumitrescu 13y ago
coming soon: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/pull/3240 https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/pull/3240

rmrfrmrf 13y ago

The author uses CoffeeScript for completely different reasons than I do. While a lot of the convenience features of CoffeeScript are awesome, I use CoffeeScript more to compile JS to standards-compliant, consistent code. Variables are hoisted, commas are automatically inserted, semi-colons are taken care of, and the entire script is put into a lovely self-invoking function that helps fool-proof things. Furthermore, because CoffeeScript requires (sort of) a compilation step, errors are caught and debugging becomes MUCH easier than it ever was with plain JavaScript. Most text editors now have plugins that will compile selected text to JavaScript so you can preview the end result and make sure that you're getting the output you want. The better part? When JavaScript best practices evolve, CoffeeScript can evolve with it, but the code can more-or-less stay the same. Awesome!

jbeja 13y ago
I couldn't agree more.

jbeja 13y ago

I literally stop reading when he start whi..talking about hate on significant whitespace.

elwell 13y ago
I literally hit downvote when he start whi..talking about whi..talking about hate on significant whitespace.
- jbeja 13y ago
  Unlike the whitespace in my code, your downvote is insignificant to me.

brianchu 13y ago

Also relevant: a big question is how CoffeeScript is going to deal with ES6 and the overlapping syntax between ES6 and CS, which may involve breaking backwards compatibility or leaving out ES6 features. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078969 jashkenas > So in general, what I'd like to see mainline CoffeeScript do, is adopt useful ES6, ES7, and ES8 features, as soon as they land in enough platforms/browsers to be widely useful (yield may be at this point already, or very soon), and to continue to try and find a pleasing minimalist syntax for writing and reading them. If this means taking the ES* syntax wholesale, that's fine. If it means minting a new (and hopefully, but arguably, nicer) syntax, that's fine too. And if it means breaking backwards compatibility, that's also alright, as the compiled lowest-common-denominator JS output will still be perfectly compatible with the new stuff.

pikachu_is_cool 13y ago

I gave CoffeeScript a shot, and frankly I don't like these JS "wrapper" languages. First of all if you want anyone else to help you with your code its likely that they don't know the wrapper's syntax and will have to waste a bunch of time learning it. My boss got super excited about it when it first came out and it just caused a lot of headache and wasted time. First I (and all my coworkers) had to learn the language, and then port all of our existing code to CoffeScript. And for what? Some syntax sugar? Honestly, I don't really see any problems with Javascript's syntax. It's everything else.

subsection1h 13y ago
> will have to waste a bunch of time learning it. Please define "bunch of time". I'm having trouble imagining how learning CoffeeScript would require more than a couple of hours for an experienced developer.
- pikachu_is_cool 13y ago
  A couple of hours is a quite a bit of time IMO. Especially if there's alot of people that need to learn the language.
  - pikachu_is_cool 13y ago
    I mean, obviously a few hours isn't honestly that much. But in terms of the actual benefit you're getting by learning CS makes it not worth it at all. Workflow improvements are negligible (if anything, it probably worsens your workflow because of the extra compilation step). There's no compelling performance enhancement. You aren't getting any real benefit from learning CoffeeScript other than some feel-good syntactical sugar.

bookface 13y ago

Can anybody explain some good use cases of implicit return? When I was doing a project in CoffeeScript last year (the only time I've used it), I found myself just using the return keyword explicitly because it was more readable, and I never ran into the issue the article talks about where it can be bad to accidentally return something from a function that should return null/undefined. When would implicit return make code better? Maybe I'm answering my own question, but I can see them being more readable to somebody coming from a Haskell or LISP background than to somebody like me who has worked mostly in C, Java, and Python.

mcphage 13y ago
> I can see them being more readable to somebody coming from a Haskell or LISP background than to somebody like me who has worked mostly in C, Java, and Python Ruby also has explicit returns. The idea is, every statement is an expression, and so has a return value. You don't need to figure out about whether a statement does or not, it just always does. One less thing to have to think about. Other things, too, but that's one that that sticks out for me.

ahoge 13y ago

> [tooling] is perfect with JavaScript Tooling is terrible with JavaScript. Even if you use something like Tern, it's still really bad. You can pass arbitrary arguments to functions. Types and arity isn't checked. Optional positional/named arguments (with default values) don't exist. Passing some options object and "foo = foo || 5" is the best you can do. You can't tell, with absolute certainty, that some object doesn't have some particular property. A string might have a "lenght" property (should have been "length", that was a typo). Your IDE can make some educated guesses and offer some auto-complete suggestions based on that. There is also type coercion. Maybe you really wanted to create NaN in a very elaborate manner. Multiplying some array with some object is totally legit. No squiggly line for that. That's a far cry from being perfect. Never used something like C# or Java? Dart's tooling is also pretty good, for example. Even AS3 offers much better tooling than JS. TypeScript does of course also offer way better tooling. JavaScript's tooling is terrible, really.

city41 13y ago
My point is JS tools work with JS as intended, and work with CS to varying degrees of success and with a variety of ways they handle CS. I was a C# developer for many years, so I know what I'm missing.

AdrianRossouw 13y ago

the only thing from coffeescript i think i will end up really missing is switch expressions. When used with conditional assignment it makes for code that is far prettier and more concise than nested if-then-else chains. [1] https://gist.github.com/Vertice/ac357533da976990dc4d https://gist.github.com/Vertice/ac357533da976990dc4d

laureny 13y ago

CoffeeScript is waning for me as well but not for the same reason: Dart and/or Typescript seem to be superior solutions, both backed by companies that are going to keep their language alive for a very long time. I'm curious which one will emerge, though.