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Comment by davepeck | Hacker News Reader

Javascript is understood by most developers these days. CoffeeScript is pretty.

(Edit: I don't think that "pretty" is a bad thing. I just... when is it the most important thing, or even high up on the priority list? Pretty isn't bad, but if it means learning an entirely new syntax and immature toolchain, its value for all but personal projects is unclear to me. I see that others value it differently, and I'm trying to understand why.)

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For competent Javascript developers the learning curve to CoffeeScript is an afternoon tops, because it is Javascript. If you consider that, it essentially becomes a free lunch since now you can express your ideas more clearly than raw JS.

Interesting. To me, CoffeeScript is emphatically not JavaScript. There are new tools and, well, there's a new syntax. Semantically they may be (almost) equivalent -- but it strikes me as a far stretch to say they're the same, or that developers will treat them the same. I suppose I would feel similarly about HAML, too.

CoffeeScript syntax is close enough to Python or Ruby syntax that the syntax itself is "instantly readable" and "quickly writable" -- HAML on the other hand is altogether new syntax and much more 'innovative' on that front than I'd argue Coffee is.

I'd be really shocked if you showed a solid Javascript programmer who has written code in a scripting language like Perl, Python, or Ruby a chunk of CoffeeScript code and he/she couldn't easily infer what was going on just by intuition alone.

You say "pretty" like it's a bad thing...

It's unusual usage as well. Like referring to a keyboard that lets me type faster or a screen that's more readable as 'pretty'.

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