Hacker News Reader

Comment by stdbrouw | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand this "bad predictability" thing. If you leave out parens, CoffeeScript always wraps to the end of the line, simple as that. Hard to visually parse at first sight in certain scenarios? Use parens, that's what they're there for. Problem solved. I'd absolutely hate it if CoffeeScript was inconsistent in how it handled these things, but it really is not.

View on HN

Not to the EOL.

  a = b c d,
    e: 1
    f: 2

Translates to:

  var a;

  a = b(c(d, {
    e: 1,
    f: 2
  }));

Though that's still predictable for me, I don't have problems with parenthesizing in Coffee (I did the translation off the top of my head and I'm pretty sure it's correct).

If you have the time and inclination, you should write something up explaining this in more detail, with examples. This point is consistently brought against CoffeeScript in nearly every article about, even those for it, and it's one of the main things keeping me (and probably others) from giving it a serious look. Of course, it still wouldn't make up for the lack of a good spec and grammar...

Even though CoffeeScript handles this consistently, the difference is subtle and can be overwhelming for beginners.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com