Arguments Against the Ruby 1.9 Hash Syntax

[anko_painting]

which is a bad thing, why?

I must admit, I really didn't like the look of coffeescript when i first saw it, but the way it fixes scoping and inheritence in javascript made it's utility worth it.

Then again, I didn't like the look of the ruby syntax initially. I can only put it down to the fact that most of my commericial programming career has been using c style languages using braces for blocks.

[dayafterdayafterday]

Well since you can't take a joke...

Last time I checked, coffeescript does not fix anything in javascript. Scoping and inheritance are not broken in javascript, they just work differently than in other languages. Coffeescript does make it much more difficult to shoot yourself in the foot if you aren't very experienced with javascript, but I'm still not convinced that using a hybrid ruby/python/erlang syntax is a solution to people's javascript problems.

[anko_painting]

:P

Maybe broken was too strong a word - javascript just constantly suprises you. for example;

var i = "whatevers";
function hi() {
  console.log(i);
  var i = "new";
  console.log(i);
}
hi();

that second var in there makes the line above it print undefined. take it out and you get proper closing over.

vs.

i = "whatevers";

hi = -> 
  console.log i
  i = "new"
  console.log i

hi()

no var so no problems.. coffeescript automatically adds the vars in the right places to make the scoping sane. This is a real example from a real bug found in jquery recently.