Hacker News Reader

I did find that odd. Whitespace helps you get away from "a wall of dense text." I'm not clear on how mandatory whitespace could exacerbate the "wall of dense text" problem.

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.

View on HN

It's really really simple. Significant whitespace has no punctuation to visually queue the reader of the code as to where things begin and end. It is much easier to read Javascript than Coffeescript because well written Javascript includes curly brackets, and other delimiting characters to aid in reading the code.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com