We don't want your coffescript | Hacker News Reader

We don't want your coffescript

blog.ponyfoo.com

32 pointsvorador50 comments

Are there people that seriously can't just read CoffeeScript as-is? Are there seriously people that can't scan through the CoffeeScript docs in about 20 minutes and pick up the language more or less?

The first time I saw CoffeeScript I immediately realized, oh, fuck yes, this is obviously better, and switched over to it immediately. I was productive with it instantly. Is it really something worth spending your time arguing about in either direction? I mean, it feels like telling someone to quit using their English accent or slang when you only understand American. Reading CoffeeScript code is hardly an effort in trying to decipher a compiler, almost all of CS's constructs do exactly what you expect if you'd have to guess, and where they are not obvious the non-obvious is due to Javascript's oddities, not anything to do with CS.

A better analogy for CoffeeScript is not another language, but it's Javascript slang or shorthand. It's a practitioners dialect of the language.

Agreed completely. My only issue w/coffeescript is that, uh, I like clojurescript better. But clojurescript is all the things coffeescript is, just more---further from javascript, more concise, less compatible with standard js tools.

coffee-script is not less compatible with standard js tools. Again, "it's just javascript" and you can use backticks in coffee to get embedded js.

Common mistake made by coffee-script-nay-sayers.

Give me a break, you know what I mean. When you look at the page source, do you see embedded coffeescript? Can you debug in coffeescript with the standard tools?

I know these things aren't possible and shouldn't be expected b/c coffee is a "compiled" language...but you can do them in javascript, and telling the vanilla js programmer that they're "exactly the same" is being less than honest.

For "vanilla js programmer", coffee-to-js-correspondance probably doesn't matter anyway. But the point of coffee is that compiler output is very straightforward. While I have to admit that tooling is far from good enough at present, I personally have no problem reading any js generated by coffee, even without source available to me. Apparently many[citation needed] coffee users can do this.

What really made the "vanilla js programmer" feel uncomfortable, I speculate, is the correct way of handling javascript oddities, such as handling nulls (`?` in coffee). They are daunting -- but ignorance is no excuse. Once you start to populate these patterns yourself in your javascript, not only would you immediately recognize them in coffee-generated js, but also you'd appreciate that coffee abstracted them.

I think these common points against coffee mostly apply to other compile-to-js languages such as clojure-script, where the generated code almost always made no sense to a "vanilla js programmer".

sure, using source maps in chrome dev tools, I can work directly with coffee source, the same way I work with less source instead of compiled css

chrome/ff dev tools have source maps support, I can work directly with coffee source the same way, as I work with less source instead of compiled css ... only coffeeconsole is in a separate tab via chrome extension

He's probably referring to debugging etc.

I can read it but it's a struggle. Much like reading Ruby, for someone who comes from Python. The syntax doesn't quite make sense to me and its usage varies between authors—a bunch of things are optional and used unpredictably (parenthesis, lambdas, indent-alignment).

Despite the Pythonish indent-based blocks, CoffeeScript is very much Ruby-like in syntax and culture. From my experience, fluent Ruby readers enjoy CoffeeScript much more.

Regardless, the point is that CoffeeScript != JavaScript. Doing things like answering JavaScript questions in CoffeeScript is simply inconsiderate and not very useful—much like answering Python questions in Ruby.

It's true—I could go ahead and learn CoffeeScript and become more fluent at it if I wanted to, but I don't. I actually like JavaScript as it is, especially the newer specifications. Same way I choose to continue using Python rather than learn Ruby more thoroughly so that I can benefit from random Ruby answers to my Python questions.

I think making analogies about this is hard. Programmers are used to thinking about languages as Big Things that change the way you think. This is not that.

I would encourage you to dedicate a block of about 30 minutes to port a single piece of non-trivial JavaScript code to CoffeeScript. You'll almost certainly neutralize any hangups you have in this short period.

The first time I tried to do this, it forever changed the way I write Javascript.

Very solid points. As someone that also enjoys JS as-is, it really frustrates me when people use CoffeeScript in JS answers and tutorials.

Wile I don't consider them to be solid points (see my reply), yours is a solid one: when one asking a question (say on SO) asks speaking in JS tongue, I'd expect the person answering to reply in JS, simply out of courtesy.

And conversely.

"Doing things like answering JavaScript questions in CoffeeScript is simply inconsiderate and not very useful"

Fuck me, right?

Strange. I know Ruby and Python and switch between them quite frequently, but generally prefer Ruby.

I loathe CoffeeScript. My problem with CoffeeScript is it imposes extra burden—to learn the syntax, and to learn how the build tools and process works (which, once you factor into account the various different web frameworks like Rails, Django, Flask and whatever brand of crazy syrup the Node people are currently drinking can be quite substantial)—but the benefit isn't there. CoffeeScript is just JavaScript but prettier.

That's not a worthwhile tradeoff for me. When Rails started doing CoffeeScript, I just opened up ~/.railsrc and popped --no-coffee in there, and my life has been a lot less painful.

CoffeeScript fixes the things about JavaScript that are least significant to me in terms of developer pain (semi-colons, curly braces and so on) but does nothing to address the things that I hate about writing JavaScript (oh, the weakly-typed type system for one thing).

If a front-ender on my team started using CoffeeScript on a project I work on, I'd take him to one side and say "it's fine to practice weird kinks in private, but compile it into JavaScript before you check it in". :)

> does nothing to address the things that I hate about writing JavaScript (oh, the weakly-typed type system for one thing

It can't because it's actually JS, by design. Yet it dutifully tries as hard as it can within this design goal by e.g making its == compile to JS ===. Maybe you'd rather be interested in ClojureScript or Dart, which use JS merely as a VM instead of their systemic core.

> If a front-ender on my team started using CoffeeScript on a project I work on, I'd take him to one side and say "it's fine to practice weird kinks in private, but compile it into JavaScript before you check it in". :)

If a back-ender[0] were to come to me-as-a-front-ender (since I'm equally both), and tell me what language to use, I'd tell him to, well, mind his own server-side business and let front-enders use whatever language they deem able to make them go from A to B in the most clean, reliable, and efficient way possible to them, or else I'll make them rewrite their stuff in NodeJS under cover of both ends being able share and reuse code, just to make them suffer ;-)

[0]: which I don't know if you are or not, but given the substance of your comment, I'd venture mostly the former.

> Yet it dutifully tries as hard as it can within this design goal by e.g making its == compile to JS ===.

Now we're effectively losing the "==" operator, which is behaving like in most other traditional scripting languages (e.g. Perl). What did we win by losing an operator? Why obfuscate that this is not the JS "==" operator but most likely the "===" operator?

Either one wants weak typing or strong typing, but one cannot have both. "most other traditional scripting languages" consists of Perl and PHP (not even (ba)sh/test, to which == is string comparison whereas -eq is integer comparison), while languages typically used on the backend together with JS/CS include Python, Ruby, Java, C#, and whatnot, none of which have such an error-prone feature.

> What did we win by losing an operator? Why obfuscate?

Type safety, and resistance against both bona fide errors and clueless developers. Sane defaults matter.

I know this was just a hypothetical, but this is a bad idea. You've lost the original source code and replaced it with something that is, I think everyone can agree CS-advocates or not, hard-to-read Javascript code.

I use Coffee everyday, and I think the features most worth looking at are that every statement is an expression, list comprehensions and the "do" statement (for closing over variables in loops).

And I'm a seasoned JavaScripter. Not a hater either. I just truly believe the benefit is there, and I urge you to take a second look. The syntax won't take you long if you put your mind to it.

I second that. I wouldn't hire any developer delivering just CS, because it shows a "just wanting getting stuff done" attitude, as opposed to some commitment to the language used and its inner workings.

Example: Maybe the most beloved feature: anonymous functions

CS: (x) -> x + x

It's like "yeah, I want to get this block done here", and it obfuscates the workings of the language (e.g.: this is a function with all its inheritance and a shared scope, it returns a reference, which can be used as any reference and is interchangeable with a reference to a named function, etc – the construct essentially obfuscates that the expression is returning an object of type "Function").

I don't think that anyone would get away with it in a C-development position, who would be delivering a source for a precompiler using a construct like, say

loop(i <- 0 .. 9):

as a replacement for

for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) {}

IMHO, this is a very JS-specific phenomenon. And it's a bit strange, having something like a lingua franca nobody seems to care about.

(Edit: Sticking to the lingua franca issue: It's a bit like having Latin as a lingua franca in the middle ages and some community using "Habs papa" for "Habemus papam". Even if "habs" compiles to "habemus" and the forth case of "papa" is easily inferred by the context, it fails the whole issue of using a lingua franca.)

> CoffeeScript != JavaScript [...] Python != Ruby

I beg to differ, CoffeeScript really is JavaScript, written (literally) differently. CoffeeScript is merely a different formal language+grammar[0] that can (and is — almost) translated word for word into the same core. The semantics and underpinnings are exactly the same as with JavaScript.

Conversely, were you writing Python with a Ruby-like formal language, it would not give you things that are profoundly Ruby, like blocks or inheritance model (classes and modules, singletons, method resolution) or open classes or require. The opposite is completely true, as writing Ruby in a Python formal language would not give you decorators or (python) modules with their imports and namespaces.

CoffeeScript vs JavaScript is literally a bikeshed over the very same core.

(That said, I'm in the CS camp because I find the language requires much less overhead to keep code safe and sound, especially when dealing with not so potent developers that just can't seem to understand that yes, var is damn important)

[0]: in the mathematical sense, i.e http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_language

Yes, this is what I've been saying all along. CS does not alter the semantics of JS, it is just a different syntax for the same language. A PL is not just its syntax. I sometimes hear new programmers say something like "it's easy to learn more programming languages once you know one, it's just syntax" and I'm not sure where they're getting this idea from :(

> The first time I saw CoffeeScript I immediately realized, oh, fuck yes, this is obviously better, and switched over to it immediately. I was productive with it instantly.

Which is fine for you. But I tried it for a project then ditched it, because it didn't justify the extra tooling required in my development pipeline, and because there are ambiguities and inconsistencies in the syntax and the language, and yes, occasionally it's actually worse than Javascript.

Which is only to say that not everyone fits into a "doesn't know CoffeeScript"/"loves CoffeeScript" dichotomy.

The point wasn't that everyone should use it. The point was that it was trivial to pick up and use so I'm often surprised when people complain about how difficult it is to read. If I handed you a piece of CoffeeScript and you literally had never read the docs, but are a competent programmer who knows Javascript well, it'd be surprising if you couldn't just read it as-is and know what it's doing since you know it's just an alternative syntax for javascript.

I don't mean to sound dense, but who isn't using some kind of build system these days with their JavaScript? "Extra Tooling" really is quite trivial given the general de-facto standards that are now in place.

As far as the ambiguities and inconsistencies go, that I can understand.

This might be shortsighted, but maybe the fact that Discourse was not "getting as many contributions as they expected simply because their JavaScript was obfuscated behind Coffee" is a good thing. Surely, the higher quality contributors prefer CoffeeScript. ;)

+1, CS can be learned in few hours and any questions on what each constuct produces can be quickly resolved in coffeeconsole for chrome

Verification: lead development of 50MD and 300MD mobile html5 apps for major UK TV's and even people who did see CS first time were able to pick it up quickly. I had literally about 5 cases when I had to answer some chat questions on how CS works, and about the same count when I corrected/optimized some CS usage in a code review.

The productivity gain was impressive. In ducktyping, but esp. in __understanding__ the code quickly.

We're not going back.

In my experience, it took essentially zero time to understand and be able to write simple CoffeeScript. Yeah, it will take some minor effort, but I see it as as parallel to templating languages in terms of your argument. It is faster and cleaner to write, and makes my life easier. I have hardly (I think never) needed to look at the output for debugging, but when I have looked out of curiosity it seemed reasonable, just with strange variable names.

Does anybody have examples of some CS code that only differs from JS in terms of syntax (eg. not defining a class or something) but compiles to something weird?

I agree and I can't help but think that all the concerns about source maps and being unable to read the output comes from people who saw the transpilation aspect to the language and freaked out, and never actually tried to use it to get something done. The only time I had to look at the source was when there were bugs in the compiler. (This was years ago, and I submitted patches.)

Coffeescript is a tool rather than a language. The syntactic conventions of this tool form a sort of "shorthand" for "best practice" javascript which happens to be also almost as easy to comprehend as javascript itself, amounting to a net productivity gain.

Given that, coffeescript is nothing beyond javascript. It does not have its own ecosystem, its own libraries, its own type system or any of the other baggage that comes with some other compile-to-javascript systems.

I'm not a CS lover, but I think most of your arguments are invalid. You say that you don't like CoffeeScript because it generates JavaScript code you don't understand. But do you understand what machine code will JS generate? No? Why? Maybe because you don't care... In general same thing applies here. If you need to debug generated JS, use source maps. This argument is not an excuse. Beside, CS is fairly simple in translating to/from JS. If you think it's not, try use dart2js ;)

Assembler is hard. JavaScript is not. It's a layer of abstraction that makes no sense to me either, particularly when there's a community of JavaScript enthusiasts already out there. If I was looking for open source project commits I know which I'd use.

I do love CS and I don't think people should answer js questions writing CS code. This is just rude. If you write your blog in CS, it's your choice, it just limits your audience.

Seeing such an angry reaction about CS is a good news, it just means that it is popular.

And for the ones who think CS is just pretty js, I suggest this reading http://aseemk.com/talks/intro-to-coffeescript

My biggest problem with CS is it's a space sensitive language that comnpiles to a space insensitive language.

Given that you'll typically interact with wild west JS that adheres to no spacing conventions, having to juggle strict spacing vs arbitrary spacing seems looks a headache.

coffee-script compiler output is pretty well-formatted -- so it's indented correctly even though javascript does not require that.

You need to get more benefit from the abstraction than the cost. I couldn't find it, in cs.

I've made thousands of mistakes (on a daily basis it feels like). In 17 years I don't think I have ever once forgotten to put 'var' in front of a variable declaration.

its not about if you make the mistakes or not per se, its about the removal of unnecessary mental burdens.

Exactly. Opening up the air, so to speak.

> Always compile your code down to JavaScript before posting a question to StackOverflow, or replying to a blog post. You might even learn things about JavaScript itself, too.

I don't see author's enormous arrogance backed by any efforts to think about his reasoning.

agreed.

You don't understand what asm.js is for, right? It is not meant for writing code in it, it is for compiling code from other languages to it. Well, sometimes you may need to write code in it for optimization. But the code you point to looks complicated not because it is written in asm.js, but because algorithm itself is compilcated. If you will rewrite it in any other language it will still contain all of these magic numbers and strange operations. In fact, almost any hashing algorithm looks like this. Just open wikipedia page for sha-1 or md5 and look at pseudocode.

I don't understand the claim the the outputted Javascript is hard to read. Whenever I have a problem with Coffeescript, the first thing I do is look at the output, usually in the Chrome devtools. If it doesn't compile, I'll yoink the offending code out and feed it into the linter at coffeescript.org. It is by far the least odious part of my workflow.

Part of me wants to claim that if Coffeescript is getting in your way, you're trying to do too much. I consider it a code smell and start to wonder what needs to get refactored.

What i've never understood about coffeescript is, since it compiles to javascript, why not just learn to write javascript in the idioms that coffeescript generates?

No one would have a problem suggesting that a developer who only used jQuery actually learn how to code in standard js without the syntactic sugar. CS doesn't compile to bytecode, it compiles to an actual, human-readable and editable language.

So why not just learn that style of javascript and save yourself the hassle of pretending there's a second scripting language for the web?

Abstracting away the messiness of classes in JS is justification enough for CS, IMHO.

Also, to use your above example, I agree understanding that style of JS is important, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't use the tool.

The author mentioned the ES6 problem, which I think is the only valid point made in the whole article (others are way too subjective).

Despite the hope that ES6 could be usable as-is, there's always the legacy syntax problem -- and the same applies to coffee-script (and its various forks). Some bad parts of javascript are going to stay in ES6 -- solved beautifully by pre-ES6 coffee, but due to the changes elsewhere we'd have to start over.

It remains unclear what we would be using when ES6 gains traction.

I'm happy to go head to head with this link baiter on who knows Javascript better :). I'm not going to take "you might even learn something about Javascript" from someone who says that a simple transpiler is a "black-box" that's totally beyond them.

p.s and a link-baiter than has a loading screen on their blog that crashes Chrome on iOS

TypeScript is the best bet if you want to write today's JS the ECMA6 (Harmony) style. It's not like CofeeScript.

Coffeescript has made me roughly 6x-8x more productive in writing 'javascript.' I can't fathom how anyone that spends more than 4 hours trying to use doesn't see the same results.

My biggest fear was debugging, but it was/has been absolutely no issue whatsoever.

Is there a mass CoffeeScript-answers-to-JS-Questions taking place on SO? Without even pointing to some instances of CoffeeScript-ers arrogance/mischief, ranting like that is not a nice thing to do.

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