Civet: The CoffeeScript of TypeScript | Hacker News Reader

Civet: The CoffeeScript of TypeScript

github.com

20 pointsYahivin17 comments

coffeescript fell out of use because ES6 brought like 90% of the benefits of cofeescript and added a few more things. One of the few things that coffeescript still had going for it was the different syntax that a lot of people like (identation-based blocks, no curly braces, etc)

As always pragmatism won and ES6 thrived, but Coffeescript still had a few things that ES6 didn't have. My favourite feature is "everything is an expression" so you can do something like this:

eldest = if 24 > 21 then "Liz" else "Ike"

see: http://coffeescript.org/#expressions

this comes from Lisp and makes a lot of things easier. Obviously this was not implemented in ES6 because it would break compatibility and there is also some problems with implicit returns that made the feature a bit weird

I wonder if a syntax like this for JS would work:

const eldest = if (24>41) { escape "Liz" } else { escape "Ike" }

with "escape" working like a mix of "break" and "return". But even then this is likely to cause incompatibilities

What about:

const eldest = 24>41 ? "Liz" : "Ike";

This is ugly and hard to read compared to trailing if.

They’re about the same for a one-liner but if you have anything more complex, Ruby style trailing if is far superior.

> This is ugly and hard to read compared to trailing if.

For short statements like the examples given here, it's not ugly and it's easy to read. Whether it's easier/harder to read than trailing if depends on how familiar you are with each syntax. I don't think either is superior in this example.

I agree ternaries are not suitable for long complex statements.

However, I don't think trailing if is suitable for long complex statements either. I've generally only seen it used in simple cases.

Hopefully I can fill in that last 10% of ES6 which is something I really missed from CoffeeScript. A lot of the features taken from Coffee were "almost as good" and that grinds me down after a while.

Basically if I can get a reimagined successor to CoffeeScript making decisions based E20xx as it is today then I'd be quite happy.

> don't mix and match words and symbols

This is an interesting design decision. Why don’t you want to combine them?

I'll probably have a compatibility option to enable them but my primary reason is that it is a less elegant design. If the benefit of `and` and `or` is linguistic comfort then that goes away with `and=` (at least for me).

Amazing name.

Presumably a pun about kopi luwak[1]?

1:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_luwak

I created this new transpiled language to bridge the gap between CoffeeScript and TypeScript. It's getting really good these days!

Cool project! It’s cool to read thru the list of what you’ve added from Coffeescripts behaviour and not. Reminds me of some things I still miss from Coffeescript!

I have been searching in the past for such a project. Great initiative

I really like this idea. Brings back the good feeling I would get with CoffeeScript's syntax being shorthand for what I would write in JS but targeted at TS. I hope this stays around and gets some traction.

Me too! I've been porting over some of my Coffee projects into Civet and fixing issues as I encounter them. It's getting better all the time.

What is CoffeeScript and why would you use it in conjunction with TypeScript?

Coffeescript [1] was a flavour of JS syntax meant to look similar to Ruby [2] syntax. You just compiled it back to JS. It was nice for working on Rails [3] projects since it made everything feel more “cohesive”.

I assume this project is here for older Coffeescript [1] projects who want to start using typescript, and need access to interfaces/types that were present in old CS files.

[1] https://coffeescript.org/

[2] https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/

[3] https://rubyonrails.org/

I see, thanks for the explanation!

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