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Comment by the_watcher | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty cool. Helloworld isn't the best way to judge how high-level a language is, right? From what I understood, CoffeeScript is supposed to improve Javascript's readability, but JavaScript had a much simpler Helloworld program.

It would be cool to see something like this but tiered by some kind of language evolution (group all the Lisps, all the Javascript-functionality languages, the C's, etc).

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Helloworld was historically more like a way to make sure your dev environment was setup right (libraries on the path, compiler actually installed). It's short pulls in a library and produces visible results. That's why it was always the intro example not because it was in any way a valid tour of the language.

well the coffeescript and javascript versions behave differently. The coffeescript is the equivalent of

    var hello = function() {document.write("Hello World")}; hello();

while the javascript is the equivalent of

    document.write "Hello World"

What's weird is that the coffeescript and javascript versions do slightly different things.

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