7 ms·

The reason that I like CoffeeScript is that it removes, what I consider, the unnecessary boilerplate of JavaScript and replaces it with a shorthand equivalent a

The reason that I like CoffeeScript is that it removes, what I consider, the unnecessary boilerplate of JavaScript and replaces it with a shorthand equivalent and good conventions. I feel that CoffeeScript is better at representing the intent of JS than JS. I can visually sift through CoffeeScript and understand the code much quicker than normal JavaScript, which in my opinion leads to more maintainable code. I'm not certain what is appealing about reading and writing more code for the same result. Many people don't like that CS needs to be compiled. I don't see this as an issue since pretty much every application I work on these days is concatenated and uglified. So adding a JS compiler is already part of most JS application's build process. 6to5 is being compiled to ES5 anyway. Also, if you include in your build pipeline a source mapper, debugging is not a problem.

qwer 12y ago
My biggest problem is definitely the source maps. It took me forever to get them to "work" and while the stack traces are mostly correct, they're often off by a line number or two. This makes debugging ridiculously hard when the line numbers are just "close". I know this might not sound like a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but I also don't think CoffeeScript really improves on js all that much, so the annoyances of source maps are just not worth it to me personally.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- untog 12y ago
  I'm surprised. I use Browserify (and Coffeeify), which spits out a source map inline at the end of the file, which has not once given me problems.
- jashkenas 12y ago
  Have you tried them at all recently? If a source map is off by a line, that's a bug that should be reported and fixed pronto.
- serve_yay 12y ago
  That sort of thing completely killed any interest I would have had in CS. When it came about I already knew JS really well and the benefits of CS just seemed too minimal for learning a new language and dealing with bugs like that.
bzalasky 12y ago
The things I hate most about CoffeeScript are the dash rockets and white-space significance. These are just opinions though. There are things I like about CS as well, like destructuring assignment and splats. Sometimes when I'm writing JS, I miss is, unless, etc... That said, I'd put my money on ES6 in the long run, though it doesn't really matter. People should use whatever makes them (and their team) happy and productive.
- tiglionabbit 12y ago
  Significant indentation is a good thing. Haskell and Python do it too. It's much easier to read indentation than it is to match up pairs of brackets in your head. In other languages, if the indentation doesn't match the brackets, you'll naturally read the indentation first and get the wrong impression of what the code does. In those languages, the indentation is supposed to match the brackets anyway. Why be redundant like that?
  - sangnoir 12y ago
    I like the indentation + braces redundancy because indentations are for humans, brackets are for the interpreter. Logic blocks are more explicit with brackets I encountered a non-obvious Python bug that was caused by mixed spaces-and-tabs: to my human eyes, the indentation looked fine - the same as previous line, but the interpreter saw a different level of indentation.
    - vertex-four 12y ago
      > I encountered a non-obvious Python bug that was caused by mixed spaces-and-tabs This is why PEP8 exists and people are supposed to follow it. Additionally, mixed spaces-and-tabs is a bug that causes poor readability - there's plenty of people who have their editors set to have tabstops as 2 or 3 spaces rather than 4, and your code will look wrong in their editors. If you think there's any issues with mixed tabs and spaces in your codebase, Python provides a tool to find out - tabnanny. Additionally, any context-aware code editor will display a warning. (If you're using Sublime Text, the plugin to use is SublimeLinter - I assume there's similar tools for vim and emacs.) You can even set spaces and tabs to display differently in many editors!
tiglionabbit 12y ago
I love coffeescript, but it seems like the source maps are still pretty garbage. I often have to turn source maps off just to make Chrome's debugger not act so crazy. When I click to place a breakpoint in the original coffeescript code, it'll show up somewhere pages off from where it should go, and it just won't let me put breakpoints at certain lines.
mattmanser 12y ago
If you've got any sort of programming skill your js will only be concatenated on test and production builds, not on development. Your last paragraph makes little sense as you should never, ever be debugging a problem on live and I think minification has caused me a problem like twice in the 8 years since it's been popular. And it was pretty obvious when it did as the is wasn't even compiling.
- kibibu 12y ago
  > you should never, ever be debugging a problem on live Until you have to
  - mattmanser 12y ago
    Then you've done it wrong. Very, very wrong. You should be able to replicate your live environment locally and not being able to is a sign of a very broken development process. I just cannot emphasise this enough. One of my skills is debugging, everywhere I've worked I've been one of the top debuggers if not the top debugger. Never, ever debug on live. If you can't recreate the problem locally, you don't understand the problem yet. Keep trying to replicate it until you do. I'm talking days of trying, not 10 bloody minutes. The key to all debugging, the very fundamental skill, is consistent replication. If you can replicate a problem consistently, you can fix it. There's a class of problems where this isn't necessarily true, especially for desktop apps, but web development problems and javascript, you can almost always replicate locally.
    - SeanDav 12y ago
      > Never, ever debug on live. If you can't recreate the problem locally, you don't understand the problem yet. I am guessing you have not been exposed to highly complex live environments. What you say is largely true but you state it as an absolute fact, which is a bit naive. Live environments tend to be far more complex than test or local environments and sometimes that complexity is what creates the bug. Sometimes the only solution is to debug live, but of course that is a last resort.
Retozi 12y ago
Ex-Coffeescript ,now Javascript with lot's of Python experience guy here. The "I understand CS code much quicker" argument is a valid one theoretically, but In my opinion, it does not hold up practically that well. CS got one thing wrong that Python got right: There are many ways to do things. When writing CS, I understood MY CS just fine... but it always took me longer to understand the CS of other people. Sometimes even longer than JS. This is such a huge drawback, and even if there is coffeelint, for teams, this is deadly. A lot of devs need to read a fair amount of foreign code. Even worse a lot of coffeescript writers also need to read and understand a lot of JS code. Understanding and reading YOUR code slightly faster gets mitigated by having longer to understand foreign code. While some JS purists fail to see that Coffeescript has some benefits, CS people also underestimate how "quickly" you can understand JS code, if you're experienced. It's all about what your brain is trained to do. In my opinion, with ES6, I would argue for most people (ceteris paribus) it just makes sense to read and write JS exlusively, if you want to maximize output-productivity of a full, practical project. Shaving off a couple of seconds "understand-time" of your personal, well written CS vs well written JS will just not compensate other things that will take you longer to do with CS.
- rapind 12y ago
  As an example that I deal with daily, writing React components in CoffeeScript v.s. Javascript really highlights the elegance of CoffeeScript. Of course you can reduce the JS verbosity with JSX instead... which again is introducing a pre-processor to the mix (one I personally am not a fan of, but w/e). ES6 adds some sweet stuff for sure, but IMO it doesn't make JS a pleasure to work with yet (which seems to be the argument?). I'm willing to bet it's not going to reduce the count in this list by much. https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/list-of-languages-that-compile-to-js https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/list-of-langu... I'm comfortable writing either as I'm sure many are, but when given the choice I opt for CoffeeScript. P.S. Good luck telling someone using ClojureScript that they should switch back to Javascript.
  - colin_jack 12y ago
    "it doesn't make JS a pleasure to work with yet (which seems to be the argument?)" My interpretation of what Retozi is saying is that CS just means that in addition to understanding JS, including ES6, you need to be familiar with all the different ways things can be done in CS. I tend to agree, especially as JS is becoming an improving with each release. What I'd like to see going forward is JS continuing to add selective sugar as is in CS, but also add functionality that makes going into a new fresh JS codebase and making sense of it easier. That side of things is less about CS, and more about the sorts of ideas you see in Dart and TypeScript.
acjohnson55 12y ago
I totally agree, but have you read the ES6 changes (i.e. what the article talks about)? To me, ES6 provides 90% of the good parts of CS, but without some of the tendency to let people write some of the headscratchers CS allows for.

qwer 12y ago

My biggest problem is definitely the source maps. It took me forever to get them to "work" and while the stack traces are mostly correct, they're often off by a line number or two. This makes debugging ridiculously hard when the line numbers are just "close". I know this might not sound like a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but I also don't think CoffeeScript really improves on js all that much, so the annoyances of source maps are just not worth it to me personally.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
untog 12y ago
I'm surprised. I use Browserify (and Coffeeify), which spits out a source map inline at the end of the file, which has not once given me problems.
jashkenas 12y ago
Have you tried them at all recently? If a source map is off by a line, that's a bug that should be reported and fixed pronto.
serve_yay 12y ago
That sort of thing completely killed any interest I would have had in CS. When it came about I already knew JS really well and the benefits of CS just seemed too minimal for learning a new language and dealing with bugs like that.

bzalasky 12y ago

The things I hate most about CoffeeScript are the dash rockets and white-space significance. These are just opinions though. There are things I like about CS as well, like destructuring assignment and splats. Sometimes when I'm writing JS, I miss is, unless, etc... That said, I'd put my money on ES6 in the long run, though it doesn't really matter. People should use whatever makes them (and their team) happy and productive.

tiglionabbit 12y ago
Significant indentation is a good thing. Haskell and Python do it too. It's much easier to read indentation than it is to match up pairs of brackets in your head. In other languages, if the indentation doesn't match the brackets, you'll naturally read the indentation first and get the wrong impression of what the code does. In those languages, the indentation is supposed to match the brackets anyway. Why be redundant like that?
- sangnoir 12y ago
  I like the indentation + braces redundancy because indentations are for humans, brackets are for the interpreter. Logic blocks are more explicit with brackets I encountered a non-obvious Python bug that was caused by mixed spaces-and-tabs: to my human eyes, the indentation looked fine - the same as previous line, but the interpreter saw a different level of indentation.
  - vertex-four 12y ago
    > I encountered a non-obvious Python bug that was caused by mixed spaces-and-tabs This is why PEP8 exists and people are supposed to follow it. Additionally, mixed spaces-and-tabs is a bug that causes poor readability - there's plenty of people who have their editors set to have tabstops as 2 or 3 spaces rather than 4, and your code will look wrong in their editors. If you think there's any issues with mixed tabs and spaces in your codebase, Python provides a tool to find out - tabnanny. Additionally, any context-aware code editor will display a warning. (If you're using Sublime Text, the plugin to use is SublimeLinter - I assume there's similar tools for vim and emacs.) You can even set spaces and tabs to display differently in many editors!

tiglionabbit 12y ago

I love coffeescript, but it seems like the source maps are still pretty garbage. I often have to turn source maps off just to make Chrome's debugger not act so crazy. When I click to place a breakpoint in the original coffeescript code, it'll show up somewhere pages off from where it should go, and it just won't let me put breakpoints at certain lines.

mattmanser 12y ago

If you've got any sort of programming skill your js will only be concatenated on test and production builds, not on development. Your last paragraph makes little sense as you should never, ever be debugging a problem on live and I think minification has caused me a problem like twice in the 8 years since it's been popular. And it was pretty obvious when it did as the is wasn't even compiling.

kibibu 12y ago
> you should never, ever be debugging a problem on live Until you have to
- mattmanser 12y ago
  Then you've done it wrong. Very, very wrong. You should be able to replicate your live environment locally and not being able to is a sign of a very broken development process. I just cannot emphasise this enough. One of my skills is debugging, everywhere I've worked I've been one of the top debuggers if not the top debugger. Never, ever debug on live. If you can't recreate the problem locally, you don't understand the problem yet. Keep trying to replicate it until you do. I'm talking days of trying, not 10 bloody minutes. The key to all debugging, the very fundamental skill, is consistent replication. If you can replicate a problem consistently, you can fix it. There's a class of problems where this isn't necessarily true, especially for desktop apps, but web development problems and javascript, you can almost always replicate locally.
  - SeanDav 12y ago
    > Never, ever debug on live. If you can't recreate the problem locally, you don't understand the problem yet. I am guessing you have not been exposed to highly complex live environments. What you say is largely true but you state it as an absolute fact, which is a bit naive. Live environments tend to be far more complex than test or local environments and sometimes that complexity is what creates the bug. Sometimes the only solution is to debug live, but of course that is a last resort.

Retozi 12y ago

Ex-Coffeescript ,now Javascript with lot's of Python experience guy here. The "I understand CS code much quicker" argument is a valid one theoretically, but In my opinion, it does not hold up practically that well. CS got one thing wrong that Python got right: There are many ways to do things. When writing CS, I understood MY CS just fine... but it always took me longer to understand the CS of other people. Sometimes even longer than JS. This is such a huge drawback, and even if there is coffeelint, for teams, this is deadly. A lot of devs need to read a fair amount of foreign code. Even worse a lot of coffeescript writers also need to read and understand a lot of JS code. Understanding and reading YOUR code slightly faster gets mitigated by having longer to understand foreign code. While some JS purists fail to see that Coffeescript has some benefits, CS people also underestimate how "quickly" you can understand JS code, if you're experienced. It's all about what your brain is trained to do. In my opinion, with ES6, I would argue for most people (ceteris paribus) it just makes sense to read and write JS exlusively, if you want to maximize output-productivity of a full, practical project. Shaving off a couple of seconds "understand-time" of your personal, well written CS vs well written JS will just not compensate other things that will take you longer to do with CS.

rapind 12y ago
As an example that I deal with daily, writing React components in CoffeeScript v.s. Javascript really highlights the elegance of CoffeeScript. Of course you can reduce the JS verbosity with JSX instead... which again is introducing a pre-processor to the mix (one I personally am not a fan of, but w/e). ES6 adds some sweet stuff for sure, but IMO it doesn't make JS a pleasure to work with yet (which seems to be the argument?). I'm willing to bet it's not going to reduce the count in this list by much. https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/list-of-languages-that-compile-to-js https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/list-of-langu... I'm comfortable writing either as I'm sure many are, but when given the choice I opt for CoffeeScript. P.S. Good luck telling someone using ClojureScript that they should switch back to Javascript.
- colin_jack 12y ago
  "it doesn't make JS a pleasure to work with yet (which seems to be the argument?)" My interpretation of what Retozi is saying is that CS just means that in addition to understanding JS, including ES6, you need to be familiar with all the different ways things can be done in CS. I tend to agree, especially as JS is becoming an improving with each release. What I'd like to see going forward is JS continuing to add selective sugar as is in CS, but also add functionality that makes going into a new fresh JS codebase and making sense of it easier. That side of things is less about CS, and more about the sorts of ideas you see in Dart and TypeScript.

acjohnson55 12y ago

I totally agree, but have you read the ES6 changes (i.e. what the article talks about)? To me, ES6 provides 90% of the good parts of CS, but without some of the tendency to let people write some of the headscratchers CS allows for.