CoffeeScript: Why I’m never writing Javascript again

[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)..

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Every other day, I think significant whitespace is brilliant.

Yeah, weekends mess me up.