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Comment by spjwebster | Hacker News Reader

My comment was prompted by the trend for at least one HNer to promote CoffeeScript in comments on an article related (however tangentially) to JavaScript.

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I don't see anything wrong with it. CoffeeScript to JavaScript is like C to Assembly, much more superior. You can strive to excel at Assembly does not mean you have to. Programmers should dedicate their time to solve real-world problems instead of fighting against their tools.

At the risk of hijacking the comment thread for an article about NodeJS to grandstand about CoffeeScript:

I'm not a big fan of leaky abstractions, and right now that's what CoffeeScript is. It will be somewhat less leaky once this has been resolved:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=618650

…for all browsers.

I'm happy for CoffeeScript to exist, to be able to play with it, and to see its syntax inform the work on JS.next. It has a way to go before I'd be happy to use it in a production environment.

CoffeeScript creates very readable JS code. I haven't seen it do much funky stuff. It mostly just adds ";" after statements, and gets rid of the "variables are local unless you * explicitly* declare them local" thing, and so on.

While this is an issue, it's a pretty minor one from my own (limited) experience using CoffeeScript. It's extremely easy to relate the JS errors to your CS code, since the JS generated is so readable. It's just a little tedious to have to take a look at the generated JS, but not that bad really. Try it out for some node.js stuff and see for yourself.

Also, the issue is being fixed for Chrome/Firefox, which is good enough for dev work.

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