I would appreciate an explanation of this paragraph. How exactly does project size compound issues with significant whitespace? Are you indenting five levels or something?
- Creating big complex methods instead of breaking code into smaller (testable) ones?
- Nesting callbacks multiple levels deep, instead of using something like Node Async to flatten out code flow?
- Choosing a Coffeescript code style that leads him to put callbacks on their own line, or something like that?
- Something else?
Not implying the author is wrong by any means - there are probably some scenarios where coffeescript isn't the best whitespace-wise. The thing is, readability is one of the huge reasons I use coffeescript, and I feel like it's largely compatible with the whitespace patterns I used in javascript. Even for large NodeJS or Angular projects, I've found that it is consistently easier to read and edit than Javascript.
Here is a typical snippet of my code as seen in my editor: http://i.imgur.com/2yVhgcz.png
IMO, those four methods really bleed together and are hard to discern, not to mention the if statements. I also think for the most part I stick with code that's "whitespace friendly", getAll there is a really long method by my standards.
Yeah, I could put more blank lines between the methods and probably some other things. But I also think a closing brace or an 'end' makes a world of difference. Really helps break up the space and compartmentalize it.
Not everyone thinks this of course. For many code like this is just fine. Like I said, it's all preference.
And instead of dropping CoffeeScript I hope you will try out ToffeeScript. But just use the basic ! thing, you don't need the other stuff like auto callback.
e, data1 = fs.readFile! 'foo'
e, data2 = redisclient.get! "thekey"
console.log data1
console.log data2I'm interested in things like ToffeeScript and JS generators. I do like what they do for code readability.
Does the author want to skip the indentation some of the time? I can think of a few marginal cases where that would be preferable. But in the vast majority of cases, you should indent any nested structure that has its own line(s). Indentation is essential for readability.
Coffeescript and significant whitespace eschew delimiters for indentation and other gimmicks, and the end result is something that is more difficult to read.
I totally agree with the author on this fact. I only see a "wall of dense text" when I read coffeescript, and when I read Javascript it is much easier to parse.
Maybe not opinion, but reaction. Generally involving visceral fear or anger.
It's not that it's always bad, every hour of every day. It's that one time, at 1am, when you shouldn't be working but you are, something doesn't behave properly, and it turns out Bob the Intern re-indented a block of code to use tabs instead of spaces[1], but you couldn't see it because your editor is configured to use four spaces per tab and your coding standards dictate four spaces per level of scope.
[1] Why are you using spaces anyway, you complete and utter savage?
i find it slows down my coding because rather than coding & then quickly tidying i instead have to obsess over this tidying at every step or the code won't work in the first place. I find it more efficient to do the code grouping as a "post-POC" task (or when things are starting to look confusing) and to leave the visual look to my discretion. I feel like whitespace languages are kindof subliminally forcing you toward 1 code style. There are some complex functions that look better to me certain ways -- specifically in cases where a group of commands are essentially executing one simple function. Once they work they can be forgotten & the programmer can de-emphasize them in some way according to taste
anyway, I am not a CoffeeScript guy. I've been avoiding it and waiting for Dart or something like that to take hold, since I'd like to see some serious language benefits if I'm going to have to introduce a compilation step. It's one of those things I remain slightly bitter about because some shops judge you for not being into it (as well as Sass, Haml) even though they offer negligible benefits for many projects. That said, I can imagine cases where CoffeeScript would offer significant benefits (they are right there in the tutorials) but I haven't really found those types of situations too much in the wild (tons of array math etc.), and if so they can often be simplified via jQuery or the like anyway.
So yea if it works for you, great, but I am glad whitespace syntax is not de-facto in the js world. I think js should remain as Java is -- other languages can be built on top of it with their own syntax types but developers still have the choice to ignore these supposed advancements & cherry-pick the ones they like (in my case progress in pure js + Dart will be where i focus my learning).
I don't mean this as a personal attack, but your comment contains plenty of spelling errors, incorrect punctuation and capitalization, and inconsistency (e.g., use of both "&" and "and"). In my experience, people who aren't careful with syntax tend to detest significant white space, which is understandable.
I would argue there are bigger problems with CoffeeScript, such as empty blocks being legal. For example:
if foo
bar()
if foo
bar()