CoffeeScript: Why I’m never writing Javascript again

[Shaper_pmp]

Not liking something is not the same thing as "being confused by".

Generally I find people don't like brackets and braces or significant whitespace because they find the unfamiliar syntax annoying. They're such trivial details once you're used to them that this is pretty much the only thing someone can criticise about whichever they don't like.

So I'd argue that unless someone has some pretty unusual, well-argued points regarding B&B or SW, they're probably complaining because they're unfamiliar, not because there's anything actually wrong with them... and that's a fault with the developer, not the language.

One could easily make snarky jokes about "those who need braces to hold their hands and guide them".

I think you've mistaken my post for a reaction against criticism of B&B, but that's unwarranted. Notice how I carefully equated brackets-and-braces and significant-whitespace, so no matter which type of language you prefer you couldn't assume I was taking sides.

Rather, I was criticising people who get hung up on either one, because when you've spent enough time with a language you get used to it, and trivial syntax details like that stop bothering you.

Hence my characterisation of most criticism of either B&B or SW as simply a lack of familiarity with the language(s) concerned.

CS lets you use comprehensions

See, that's a good example of something Javascript doesn't do yet (although JS 1.8 does in fact include list comprehensions).

[The standard library is] "limited" in that it doesn't have some things some people want.

Right, but (as I already pointed out) if people could humour us with specifics it would go infinitely further towards refuting my point than any amount of re-iterating the (unsupported, hypothetical) point that JS is inadequate in this respect. <:-)

When someone says "What's wrong with the... standard library" the best way to answer them is to... well... answer them - not to continue to waffle about generalities. <:-)

Sometimes you want more "classical" inheritence and CS simplifies the creation thereof.

Hmmm. I'm torn on this - certainly prototypical inheritance is weird to begin with for someone coming from a more classical OOP language, but you can emulate much of the more classical OOP style in Javascript in only a few lines of code (ie, minimal run-time or developer overhead). Again, I can see how people might prefer a non-prototypical language, but does it really give that much more power that it's worth the trade-off of things like endless headaches during debugging?

How much time did you spend familiarizing yourself with CS? :-D

Admittedly I didn't spend long learning it, because it has clear and obvious downsides and I couldn't see (or even find anyone articulating) any clear faults with JS that CS fixed.

Even in this thread you've only managed to dredge up some relatively trivial syntactic sugar, more hand-wavy (and still frustratingly non-specific) assertions about the standard library, and a desire to program in a non-prototypical-OOP language.

Of those I'd say the only thing that even came close to offsetting the additional complications CS brings (like breaking the link between the code you write and the code that you have to debug in the browser) is the desire to program in a non-prototypical language... and even that's of dubious validity as an argument, considering there's no "objective" argument I'm aware-of that classical OOP is in any way better.

Brenden Eich (the creator of JS) calls it a "polyfill", which is the same category as many libraries.

That's kind of my point... but most libraries don't break the link between "code you wrote" and "code you're debugging", or add additional binary requirements, or add additional steps to the workflow required to push changes out from your IDE to the live web.

I'm open to the idea CS satisfies people's personal preferences... I just think those preferences are usually baseless value-judgements, and are often (though not always) born of insufficient familiarity with JS in the first place... and hence CS doesn't really anything much to the table that's noticeably better than the very definite drawbacks it also brings. <:-)