Comment by picardo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by picardo | Hacker News Reader

CoffeeScript syntax is better and cleaner than the ES6 syntax. It's a fun language, and I've been using it everyday since it came out. On small projects, it's top-notch.

But the future of CoffeeScript is bleak because many software designers are beginning to understand the value of type systems, e.g. TypeScript and Flow, for building maintainable Javascript code bases, and this means CoffeeScript is out of the picture for good because its long term design goal is to remain a minimalistic language, and doesn't intend to support these ideas. There have been attempts[0] to fork it to add a legitimate type system to it so it can scale, but they have faltered. Aside from that, the way CS deals with variable shadowing[1] makes it risky to use in large codebases.

So when ES6 syntax is tolerable and stable, I will pack my bags and move over to the ES6 land with great regret. I wish I could stay in CS land for longer, but you have to put away childish things eventually.

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[0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/typed-coffee-script

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15223430/why-is-coffeescr...

Variable shadowing sounds like a hacky way to solve problems caused by function scoping, which is solved in ES6 by introducing lexical scoping (i.e. the same scoping rules as in every other language).

It's also worth pointing out that CS and ES6 aren't really comparable technologies. ES6 isn't some newfangled preprocessor that simplifies syntax, it's an update to the standard which JS adheres to. CS is fundamentally limited because it compiles to ES5.1. When ES6 is implemented in browsers, CS will be able to do more.

>> which is solved in ES6 by introducing lexical scoping I thought JS has always had lexical scoping. What's new in ES6 allowing variables to have block scope.

Speaking of putting away childish things (like effect-ridden, imperative spaghetti code), PureScript is my new CoffeeScript.

http://purescript.org

I've been looking into that myself, but then I found Elm[0] and stopped looking. :)

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[0] elm-lang.org

Oh, Elm is cool. I get that. So is Haste[0].

But I think PureScript is a more practical choice for targeting JavaScript. (It generates much smaller, more readable output, for one thing.)

I don't promise to have my mind made up, though. I'm still furiously taking in all of this Haskelly stuff, and it looks like a pretty long road ahead.

I've been telling people that I feel like I've crawled into a tunnel, and can't back out again. I seem to have no choice but to keep crawling towards that tiny beam of light.

I don't know how many times I'd looked at the ML family, and just couldn't appreciate it immediately enough... but somehow I've managed to become completely obsessed, to the extent that anything less really turns my stomach.

[0] http://haste-lang.org/

Have you found a good framework that purescript supports in the vein of Angular or React? I had a look a while back but the support was a bit spotty for me.

I can't personally recommend any yet, as I'm still warming up to it, myself.

https://github.com/purescript/purescript/wiki/Recommended-Li...

Maybe https://github.com/paf31/purescript-thermite ...

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