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In the end its all a matter of taste, and not any actual objective gain in developer productivity, which loops us back to the original point. If you have a tea

In the end its all a matter of taste, and not any actual objective gain in developer productivity, which loops us back to the original point. If you have a team of people who love and want to do haml/coffeescript. have at it. If not, its just another thing to learn for people who'd rather not.

lowboy 13y ago
If you're willing to learn CS, it is objectively better. I've been able to more efficiently write, read, and maintain CS than the equivalent JS. Having external factors such as a diverse team, or wanting to draw from a larger pool of developers should factor in to your decision to adopt CS. But as a language, I can say it's objectively better in my experience.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > If you're willing to learn CS, it is objectively better. I've been able to more efficiently write, read, and maintain CS than the equivalent JS. "I've been able to ..." indicates that it is subjectively better (better for the individual reporting.) It is not the kind of information that supports a claim of objective superiority.
  - lowboy 13y ago
    Fair point - I kept it to my experience because I don't have any objective empirical sources to draw from, so maybe I shouldn't use that word. I would argue that it is objectively better to have less boilerplate code (hasOwnproperty(), loop var initialization, lack of splats), visual clutter (brackets, braces, etc), strict comparison by default, string interpolation, array range notation, destructuring assignment, etc. My experience does back that up, but again, I can't source any objective empirical evidence. And it's important to have a thorough knowledge and experience with both languages. I find in arguments about CS, there's a lot of knee-jerk reaction from people who haven't given CS a fair shake. It had (has?) a "Ugh, hipster" backlash against it.
slantyyz 13y ago
With things like Haml and Coffeescript, the only truth is that YMMV. On the individual level, I do think you can find actual objective gains in developer productivity, but on a aggregate level, it becomes muddier because of the variation of developer habits. Personally, I eliminated a lot of problems associated with close tags in my markup by using Haml. But my coding habits aren't someone else's coding habits, so Haml (or Coffeescript) can go from being a solution to being a problem for someone else.

lowboy 13y ago

If you're willing to learn CS, it is objectively better. I've been able to more efficiently write, read, and maintain CS than the equivalent JS. Having external factors such as a diverse team, or wanting to draw from a larger pool of developers should factor in to your decision to adopt CS. But as a language, I can say it's objectively better in my experience.

dragonwriter 13y ago
> If you're willing to learn CS, it is objectively better. I've been able to more efficiently write, read, and maintain CS than the equivalent JS. "I've been able to ..." indicates that it is subjectively better (better for the individual reporting.) It is not the kind of information that supports a claim of objective superiority.
- lowboy 13y ago
  Fair point - I kept it to my experience because I don't have any objective empirical sources to draw from, so maybe I shouldn't use that word. I would argue that it is objectively better to have less boilerplate code (hasOwnproperty(), loop var initialization, lack of splats), visual clutter (brackets, braces, etc), strict comparison by default, string interpolation, array range notation, destructuring assignment, etc. My experience does back that up, but again, I can't source any objective empirical evidence. And it's important to have a thorough knowledge and experience with both languages. I find in arguments about CS, there's a lot of knee-jerk reaction from people who haven't given CS a fair shake. It had (has?) a "Ugh, hipster" backlash against it.

slantyyz 13y ago

With things like Haml and Coffeescript, the only truth is that YMMV. On the individual level, I do think you can find actual objective gains in developer productivity, but on a aggregate level, it becomes muddier because of the variation of developer habits. Personally, I eliminated a lot of problems associated with close tags in my markup by using Haml. But my coding habits aren't someone else's coding habits, so Haml (or Coffeescript) can go from being a solution to being a problem for someone else.