I started taking a look at CoffeeScript recently. Maybe its a little late, and much the hype has warn off, but I have seen a few projects here and there recently that were written in it. I Also noticed [url=“https://github.com/styleguide/javascript”]Github’s Styleguide includes the bullet point “Write new JS in CoffeeScript.” So that’s something.
I was wondering if anyone had used it much and what they thought.
My first impressions are that it’s nice if you know what you’re doing and you’re one of those people that love typing as little as possible. After all, that’s really all it is in the end, a shorthand for JavaScript. Debugging also wasn’t as bad as I thought. The parser does a pretty good job of explaining the problems it runs into. But there was that whole increased failure rate because of my lack of familiarity with the technology. That got better with time. One of the nicer aspects, I thought, was writing classes in CoffeeScript. That was pretty smooth given the work it does in the background for you. If I had to complain, it would be about moving comments over ruby-style comments (prefixed with # instead of //). Was that really necessary? (There’s a lot of ruby pulled into CoffeeScript)
