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Comment by smokeyj | Hacker News Reader

This is like saying people should avoid jquery because everything jquery does can be done with javascript. Some of us enjoy the convenience of not dealing with hacks.

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Can you give an example of a javascript hack that you have to deal with?

I don't like having to manually check for globals. Other people's code tends to be loaded with missing 'vars'.

CoffeeScript won't fix other people's code for you.

It does fix that specific issue.

so does jslint...

Regarding missing vars, JSLint will alert you that you've made a mistake, Coffeescript prevents it from happening in the first place, not quite apples to apples.

Dealing with inconsistent API's across browsers.

CoffeeScript can't help you there.

It can and does. Coffeescript will never write:

["dog","cat"].forEach(function(animal){ console.log(animal) });

Which will run just fine on your development browser, but will break for real customers.

FYI, I don't use coffeescript, but I am at least aware of some problems with Javascript.

CoffeeScript will write that if you tell it to:

[1, 2].forEach (i) => alert i

Array.prototype.forEach and friends are trivial to shim and shouldn't be broken for anybody.

But jQuery can. Which was the argument.

jquery improves the crappy DOM API and its vendor inconsistencies, not javascript the language. if anything improves javascript in terms of syntax, it's underscore/lodash or coffeescript.

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