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Destroyer661

Out of all the languages to choose from it just had to be coffescript...

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It's my main language for almost two years now ;)

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you...

...than u rule da web.

I'm not saying that it being your main language is bad, it's just the syntax is absolutely terrible to read and understand for those of us on C-style languages. If the point was to teach others, the vast majority of your audience is not going to be reading coffeescript and learning much.

In all code examples you can press the down arrow to view the horrible (c-style) Javascript source.

The javascript seems to be mainly horrible because of the coffeescript code being object oriented and its lack of a more powerful looping construct.

It looks like there is something missing in the first example in Javascript.

Population = (function() { Population.prototype.genomes = []; })();

This throws a ReferenceError because Population is not defined.

Genome = (function() {

  Genome.prototype.values = [];

  function Genome(values) {
    this.values = values != null ? values : this.initial();
  }

  Genome.prototype.inital = function(){
    return [RANDOMARRAY FROM [0-14]]
  }

})();

After this part Genome will be undefined.

Thx, forgot to copy the var statements. It's fixed now.

IMHO, I don't think it is fair to suggest this.

- There are GA tutorials available in several other languages, if this doesn't work for you. Btw, if a tutorial was offered in Lisp/Haskell, would we see the same suggestion?

- For Ruby/Python programmers, this isn't hard at all to read. Familiarity with non C-style languages might be something to pick up.

- Having moved to Coffee from C-style languages, I prefer coffee. But that is just my opinion.

I think HNers should be more tolerant of language choices. That argument can't really be won.

that's funny because coffeescript is meant to be all about readability in code. I wonder if you really tried to read this or if you just commented based on the title. If you did really read it, I wonder if you found it hard to read because your opinion is tainted by those C style languages? It's not scientific of course but I just got my non coder, non technical girlfriend to read through both the coffeescript and javascript versions of this and I definitely had to explain a lot less to her with the coffeescript version, she says it's easier to read because it's structured more like plain English.

Hurrah. That's a big part of the entire premise.

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