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Comment by IsaacSchlueter | Hacker News Reader

I think part of the gist of the article was that abused CoffeeScript is more bad than abused JavaScript. So, yes, of course, you can do everything differently. But the point is, in the moment when writing it, it's not confusing, and doesn't stand out as a bad thing. Later, when you look at it, it IS confusing.

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I dunno. I think that a lot of that is just a matter of developer maturity and code discipline. If you can't recognize a code smell when you're writing code, the problem is probably that you aren't mature enough as a developer, not that the language is bad for allowing it. I don't think that most seasoned developers would look at that 160-column list comprehension, say "okay, that works!" and move on to the next task. They'd say "okay, that works, but holy crap it's ugly. Quick, to the refactormobile!" I've seen 160+ column nested ternary operations in pure Javascript that make the aforementioned comprehension look positively poetic.

I've seen some genuinely horrible Javascript. Like, stuff that so terribly abuses the language without any comprehension whatsoever of closures or context binding and only works because the author got stupidly lucky and/or abused globals so badly that the code was effectively one giant function. In both cases, bad developers writing bad code are going to produce unmaintainable messes. Doesn't mean that the language should be avoided. Garbage in, garbage out.

The code smells are on the demo page for CoffeeScript.

Which bits do you consider to be code smells, out of curiosity? Things like postfix conditionals and list comprehensions generally aren't considered to be smells by the majority of people that use them. I don't see any 160-column list comprehensions or implicit bracketless object returns there, which are genuine smells.

once you turn a comprehension into a multi-line block of code it looks just like JavaScript, so ... :\

I've seen terrible JS, but I've seen much worse CS. Most programmers have relatively no sense of organization, and when unleashed with CS create things far more nasty than their JS counterparts.

nasty: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/blob/master/src/r...

nasty: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/blob/master/src/o...

nasty: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/blob/master/src/c...

sexy: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/blob/master/src/g...

Unfortunately, in this particular case, the code was equally nasty even when all of those methods were written in Ruby, and has grown nastier over time through pull requests. I think it tells you far more about the author than the language ;)

I've seen terrible assembly but I've seen much worse C. Most programmers have relatively no sense of organization, and when unleashed with C create things far more nasty than their assembly counterparts.

nasty: https://github.com/mirrors/gcc/blob/master/gcc/c-family/c-co...

nasty: https://github.com/mirrors/gcc/blob/master/gcc/c-family/c-le...

But you get the idea. I'm merely pointing out that compilers are tricky and complicated beasts. And especially in the rewriter CS has to jump through hoops to disambiguate.

I dont know if I would call CS complicated, but yeah you'll get that all the way down. Noobs will write their js, bigger noobs write CS, smarter people off writing C, and even smarter people writing ASM. Most will still write nasty code regardless but the ambiguity in CS makes this far more painful to consume

That is an opinion. I like that CoffeeScript allows me to have more choice over how I write my programs. If I want to write a piece of code in a different way, I can. If I don't think it will improve readability, I won't. You don't have to use all features of CoffeeScript all the time.

Plus, if you don't like it at all, just don't use it and quit complaining. :)

I think the point of this article is that because of Coffee's wide use, developers will often find themselves in a situation where they can't "just don't use it".

You could say "don't take that job", but I think the point of the article is to make it clear that CoffeeScript is not an unvarnished win, and that choosing to use it will result in otherwise qualified people taking your advice and not wanting to work on your project.

Exactly my point Issac. It feels great when you write it, but when you wake up in the morning...

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