Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rapind 4153 days 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-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.
1 comments
colin_jack 4153 days 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.

link
rapind 4152 days ago
My experience is the exact opposite. I find that CS removes a lot of the JS gotchas, and I'm not clear on the many ways that CS let's you do something, especially in comparison to JS. If anything it protects you a bit, by trying to enforce some of the "good parts".

http://arcturo.github.io/library/coffeescript/07_the_bad_par...

To each his own, but to me CS has been and continues to be a complete and obvious win over JS. 9 times out of 10 the benefit outweighs the annoyance of requiring a preprocessor for me.

link
colin_jack 4147 days ago
On the multiple ways, I was sure I read a post that documented them all and had me nodding along but can't find it, this one seems good though [1].

[1] http://ceronman.com/2012/09/17/coffeescript-less-typing-bad-...

link
rapind 4147 days ago
Out of all of those points, it's really just the commas and curlies that I've found can lead to some confusion, in my experience at least.

I haven't come up with a better approach than simply agreeing on a convention with your team though TBH. It's not too bad when everyone's on the same page and familiar with the gotchas (same could be said for most langs).

I put together a post comparing some of the syntax differences as it relates to building ReactJS components in case you're interested: http://rapin.com/blog/2015/02/03/reactjs-with-coffeescript/

Given that JS itself has quite a few different ways to do things though, it's kind of a wash.

link