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Comment by rzimmerman | Hacker News Reader

This is a project I've been working on in my spare time for a while now and I've finally decided to throw it out there and get some feedback. Do you think the 'wait for' callback syntax is useful? What big features do you think are missing?

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The async handlers looks great, specially parallel and series iterators. I'm not sold on

    wait for friends from db.friends.find()
    //vs
    friends = await db.friends.find()

it's a bit hard to follow despite the natural language.

Is this a fork of the CoffeeScript compiler? Will it benefit from upstream changes/features?

It's not a fork of CoffeeScript (though there are a lot of similarities). I'd initially tried doing that but I really couldn't get things to work the way I wanted. Mostly, it's a pretty major rearchitecture to get coffee to parse a function block that way.

I think syntax highlighting helps a lot in this case, so try out the tmbundle in Sublime or TextMate (https://github.com/rzimmerman/kal.tmbundle) if you can.

I also vote for 'await' here. The 'wait for friends from' construct looks too much like BASIC for my liking. It's not clear which terms are built into the language ('wait', 'for', 'from') and which are not ('friends'). Also, since the eventual result of that line is an assignment to 'friends', using the existing = operator makes the language more consistent.

Thanks for the feedback. It seems like a lot of people would prefer a more normal looking assignment.

If you get a chance (and use TextMate or Sublime Text), please give syntax highlighting a try (https://github.com/rzimmerman/kal.tmbundle)!

Unfortunately I don't use those editors — maybe you can write a Vim highlighter next? Might also be worth adding syntax highlighting to the website (even if you have to do it manually for now), if you're set on the current syntax and think highlighting will make that much of a difference.

Have you tried converting it in: http://coloration.ku1ik.com

Although I cannot agree more with you and csheid, you really should give sublimetext a try. I've been quite impressed.

It's more than assignments looking normal. "await x" is better since it's an expression and not a statement. That is, "await x" will be a placeholder for a value (after the appropriate CPS, of course), while the assignment syntax forces you to use a temporary variable, even if you don't need it.

I'll stick up for the "wait for" syntax here. It seems a lot cleaner to me than trying to shoehorn asynchronous handling into assignment, with all the edge cases that entails.

Would it be hard to support both syntaxes?

Looks pretty good! I like it. To be honest I will not use it in my projects. I prefer using ES6 syntax for this problem when it's available.

what's the (equivalent?) ES6 syntax? I'm genuinely curious.

I'd be more interested in performance than features. If you use tasks when they're not needed, how much more JavaScript code does it take and how fast does it run? Also, what do stack traces look like?

Are you aware of the ToffeeScript project? Can you make them a website and start promoting it? Because you are missing all if the features in ToffeeScript/CoffeeScripy and ToffesScript needs a shiny website because that's how people judge languages now is how shiny their website is apparently based on the fact that no one seems to care about ToffeeScript. BTW no I'm not the author of ToffeeScript.

This is a fantastic spare time project. At the very least, it will be a beautiful feather in your cap :)

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