| > What speed and ease to you gain with it? Speed and ease of development! Yes it is mostly syntactic sugar, where I wanted to make a point is that this "sugar" adds more to the language than sweetness for the sake of it. It exposes beautiful pattern that are cluttered in day to day javascript syntax. My final compiled javascript code is not the same I would have produced would I have coded directly in Javascript. Coffeescript also gives me a different approach to think about a problem. > Things like it's expressive for loops and default arguments generate really ugly code, and shun people from using ES5 array methods like .forEach, .map, and .filter, which are a lot cleaner and more optimizable by the engine. I use underscore which will delegate to .forEach et all it they exist... I really rarely use loop comprehension, though they can be very expressive if used correctly.. > CoffeeScript will completely obscure the way JavaScript works to newcomers I disagree. I've installed the proper plugin (I'm on emacs, same is true for vim, sublime or lightTable), I am therefore two stroke away from the compiled javascript. Furthermore, I spent a decent amount of time a week in the debugger where the code is in JS. If I could have disliked this in the beginning, having two different languages whether you code or debug can seem unfamiliar, I actually love it. It keeps my Javascript sharpen and it gives a thorough understanding of exactly what's happening in my Coffeescript code. And that's exactly where I found a niche for Coffeescript. In my opinion, it is definitely not a replacement for Javascript, it is a cleaner, more expressive and easier way to write it, without any real overhead. Honestly, it took me minutes to understand and less than a day to feel comfortable and be efficient in Coffeescript. What I recommend to newcomers is to use coffeescript's syntax to to learn Javascript, by continually compiling down to JS and understanding what's happening. The JS output by CS isn't ugly at all, and that is a strong point. It is really possible to learn some great javascript idoms just by applying built-in coffeescript construct and understanding their value and working in JS > JavaScript isn't designed to have true OOP principles ... Hmm right... ? |