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Comment by calibraxis | Hacker News Reader

Personally, even if I conceded Coffeescript is worse in some scenarios [1], I still evaluate Coffeescript as far preferable to Javascript overall. There's multiple dimensions to consider. (Disclaimer: I've only compared the two on the backend, so far.)

[1] Like representing datastructures. Or that subclass-without-constructor subtlety (https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/2956).

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I don't see that the less verbose syntax of CoffeeScript buys you that much and it's another level of indirection to worry about. My problems with JavaScript are that you're flying blind when you could have an editor pointing mistakes and making helpful suggestions. I tried Dart as a replacement first (too far removed from the JavaScript) and settled on TypeScript, which is a dream because it provides the help I want without obfuscating the resulting JavaScript at all.

Coffee buys me sanity, can easily parse it vs. the giant syntactic mess that is JavaScript.

Coffee is to JavaScript as Scala is to Java.

Compilation blazes with GruntJS as well so overall it's a complete and utter win [for me].

> Coffee is to JavaScript as Scala is to Java.

Considering how incredibly wrong and broken CoffeeScript's scoping is (at least the JavaScript designers realized that they messed up badly), I'd consider that an insult for Scala. :-)

CoffeeScript and Javascript aren't your only options. I quite like CoffeeScript on the whole, but I'm still planning to look into using LiveScript or GorillaScript for the next substantial JS-based project I work on, since they both capture what I like about CS while appearing to fix some of the issues.

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