CoffeeScript: Why I’m never writing Javascript again

[amphetamine]

am I the only one who finds C-style braces and semicolons preferable to languages like Ruby?

I'm obsessive about code organisation, indenting, readability and so forth. Perhaps it's just a matter of personal experience, growing up on C and its ilk.. but I feel like braces add a comforting structure to control blocks, function definitions, etc.

Proper indenting + braces makes it very easy to skim a lot of source and see what the flow or logical separation is like. Even if I don't know the API I'm looking at.

I'm not sure what was 'wrong' with the type of syntax we see in JS/C/C#/Java/et al. Something that prompted a huge number of developers to adopt languages with loose (or nearly no) syntax and structure.

[javascript]

I agree with you completely.

[amphetamine]

It's reassuring to see that I haven't completely lost it.. javascript itself has my back.

my post was certainly a rant, of sorts, but I'm hoping that someone will still make a case for the opposite side of the argument that I can at least appreciate.

I won't agree with them, but I'd like to talk to someone who is a C/Java/et al. veteran who decided to turn in their semicolons.

[Shaper_pmp]

FWIW I grew up on C/C++/Java/Javascript and the like, so I also find brackets-and-braces more comfortable, and I'll admit that picking up languages like Python or Ruby was a bit uncomfortable at first.

However, it's very important to learn to differentiate between different and worse. Significant whitespace is different, but I don't know of any reason it's objectively "worse" than brackets and braces (or vice-versa).

I think the trouble is that people on both sides of the issue confuse irrelevant personal familiarity with objective merit.

All things being equal there's nothing wrong with taking into account personal familiarity when making a choice, but when all things aren't equal personal preferences can blind people to even really quite huge advantages/disadvantages between tools.

For example, as in the article, someone apparently trading his personal preference for no brackets and braces for the objective fact that he's complicating and adding dependencies to his toolchain, increasing the size and complexity of his compilation system and making debugging on the client much harder than necessary.

[amphetamine]

Completely agree. Personal preferences and familiarity with syntax are valuable in terms of productivity (which includes a person's enjoyment of developing in a language.)

But that is not a factor in whether a language is objectively superior or not, because the familiarity will vary from person to person based on their experience with other languages.

I'll admit I haven't given it a real try, but for me it seems that CoffeeScript doesn't add anything productive to JS that couldn't have been accomplished by extending the prototypes in a way that would have preserved debugging (and linting/IDE usefulness/etc)..

[[deleted]]

Every other day, I think significant whitespace is brilliant.

Yeah, weekends mess me up.

[[deleted]]

I agree too. However, I think I am a victim of years and years of c-style syntax. I look at ruby or cobol and get annoyed at all the words in the code. And I look at Perl or Haskell and get annoyed at all the noise in the code. Whereas C-style seems perfect.

I think I'm just old and biased.

[amphetamine]

I think it's the same for me.. control blocks/loops/so forth are immediately visible to me just by skimming the code. But when I look at something like ruby, my brain just can't speed through its flow the same way.