Comment by sings | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sings | Hacker News Reader

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Personally I’ve also always found Coffeescript easier to read and more pleasurable to write because of its syntax, especially its reliance on white-space. But it seems this is one of those things that really divide people into two groups.

My only bug bear about coffee was its lack of a concise ternary, but it’s use of is/or/unless worked well for me.

I’m a bit sad that my Coffee/Pug/Sass/Yaml stack is supported out of the box in fewer places than it was, all sharing principles of less punctuation, and for me, more clarity as a result, but community support is pushing me towards migrating back to vanilla JS. Glad that some features are coming across, but things like destructuring aren’t as powerful (no [first, middle..., last]). Will be happy to see nullish coalescing come over.

I think the typing thing is relevant for big teams, something I’ve had the luck of avoiding for the most part.

Unless is hugely valuable to me, "do x unless y" is great when x should happen in almost all cases.

It avoids the noise of if statements, I really miss it in languages that don't have it.

I have a really hard time parsing `unless`. Whenever I encounter it in Ruby or CoffeeScript code, it takes me 10-30 seconds to stop and understand what's happening with the code.

Generally, postfix conditionals are a bad idea because they are garden-path sentences [1] by design.

Glad you find them valuable, but IMO they epitomize what many other comments in this thread have said about CoffeeScript's poor readability.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

I don't see anything common in structure between postfix `unless` and examples of garden-path sentences, which seem to be based on word ambiguity. Nothing is ambiguous in e.g. `print(x) unless x != 0`. Although admittedly without syntax highlighting, conditionality it's less obvious.

You're right, coffeescript's refusal to use python's more sensible ternary idiom ('normal' if condition else 'abnormal') is strange, especially since it already has the useful trailing-if idiom ('normal' if condition).

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