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> How easy it is to digest

I’ve not had this experience. I’ve found the ambiguity in coffeescript a maddening adventure in syntax confusion.

- function call syntax doesn’t need parens except if a 0 parameter method

- commas are largely optional both in arrays and function parameters. How do you parse: [f, f(), f a b c]

- implicit returns are a terrible idea.

- the @ syntax refers to either a ‘static’ method or an instance variable depending on the context.

- I have to do a double take for the object literal syntax every time

Don't want to invalidate your experience. For me though, I rarely struggled with ambiguity.

> function call syntax doesn’t need parens except if a 0 parameter method

Function call syntax doesn't require parens so to make multi-line calls punctuation-free. Especially if some args are objects.

> commas are largely optional both in arrays and function parameters. How do you parse: [f, f(), f a b c]

Well commas are not optional.

> implicit returns are a terrible idea

They're especially elegant in writing declarative code. It takes some getting used to though.

> the @ syntax refers to either a ‘static’ method or an instance variable depending on the context.

Agreed.

These are all tradeoffs though. For me, they struck the right balance between ambiguity (very little) and expressiveness.

LiveScript in comparison was much more sugary (which I preferred): https://livescript.net/

Haha, yes. LiveScript should have won. It were awesome times.

Well, guess it's Reason for me now :D

I was very excited about CS when I learned about it, and in my initial tests found it really pleasant to write. However, before committing to using it more, I went and read some other projects written in it. At that point I decided that the reading experience was confusing, and the lack of "visible" syntax elements to guide me drove me nuts.

My experience was that I always found my CoffeeScript really easy to read since I was always internally consistent with which opinional bits I used and which bits I ignored.

Reading other people's CoffeeScript on the other hand...

Don't forget fat arrow vs. thin arrow. If you're not writing Coffeescript 24/7 you start to forget which is which.

You just gave me an idea.. because we've shared a similar experience.

I really miss the elegance of Coffeescript. ES6 is great, Typescript is great, but sometimes I feel like I have to visually parse a lot of static cruft to read the essence of the program.

What if one's editor had a toggle hotkey to hide typescript typings. Maybe you could turn it off to visually parse the program real quick, before turning it back on to edit it.

Hmm...

You're getting in the realm of "projectional editing." It's a fascinating idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15534555

Yep. You can take MPS today and implement an AST projection that looks like whatever you want. No parsing involved, impossible to even write syntactically invalid code (since it is not code you're writing, but an AST projection).

I love reading about stuff like this, thanks for sharing. Developer UX still has a lot of room to grow.

Interesting. I sometimes wish to only see the types and get rid of the rest.

What about instead maintaining the type definitions in a separate file, and then having the editor add in the type hinting?

TypeScript is so syntax heavy. But my perspective is that there are costs incurred at time of development and maintenance in return for stability at runtime. And I think the latter is far more important if you're writing production code.

When it comes to experimentation, I love Javascript and Python because of how fast they are to write when you're not thinking hard about types.

Then it's just discipline to know how to promote experiments to production code. TypeScript is beautiful because you can just turn it on and add them in. Same with Python type hints.

If you want the quiet syntax of CoffeeScript and even better type safety than TypeScript, you might be interested in Elm.

https://guide.elm-lang.org/

I love Elm. Never got to use it in production though. Can't afford to get even further from the metal :)

Elm is not compatible with js library or at least it's not seamless.

Yeah well, sometimes js library isn’t compatible with js library either

CS is what happens when you let Ruby devs write JS.

TS is what happens when you let .net devs write JS.

Let's see how that turns out in the long run.

The most depressing thing for me as someone who loves F# is how `.net` is nearly synonymous with C# in most people's minds

I have the feeling Reason has more in common with F# than TypeScript, haha.

> Reading my old code, I was surprised by how clean it looks. How easy it is to digest. There is a certain sense of calm when your brain doesn't have to process all the visual clutter of a C-style syntax. I miss that.

Indeed, Coffeescript is one of the finest languages I wrote in. Consider that 95% of the time we are reading code, what is the win of TS with a linter? The TS codebases I've worked on really hurt my eyes and brain, and that for some stupid website where type safety hardly makes any difference at all. And all those average web developers I've worked with bragging about type safety while the code they are producing is full of wrong constructs, bad naming, dependent on heavy tooling, etc..