This is a game changing moment for Individual freedom. The rights of a tribe lost can be gained by collective action. The rights of the Individual are a wholly different matter, requiring a depth of conviction hardly known to most. Its easy to march and occupy, but to declare and represent personal liberty is a whole other matter. The protected customer of freedom is nothing like the sovereign masters of liberty. It will always be so.

We are a tribe in aggregate only, we live free as Individuals. Equality and personal empowerment are expressions of Individual choice, not tribal collective will. You must understand where true Human power comes from… not the group… but from within.

Don’t get me wrong this is **important**, but it’s not in the same boat as the toxic thinking “you’re not as much of a person as I am”

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3495947

Dealing with complexity inherent in the language means that you have less brain cells to rub together for the complexity of your overall program, so Coffescript is clearly a winner in that department.

The added complexity with Coffeescript is that it is another layer of abstraction on top of Javascript. That is the main tradeoff when using Javascript. Which manifests itself in a number of ways including, having to potentially compile/build, debugging is more complex etc. etc.

To pose this another way, if Coffeescript came first and someone wrote Javscript to compile into it. You would think they were bat shit crazy.

[...]Why the rampant fanboyism around CoffeeScript worries me « Technics[...]…

Looking forward for your next installment.

Your fear that CoffeeScript leads to line noise and is harder to scan utterly misunderstands the design goals of CoffeeScript. Sure, CS cuts out and shortens syntax here and there, but the ultimate goals are greater consistency and better readability. It’s about things like default arguments, list comprehensions, function binding, destructuring assignment and so on, which are obviously all things that are *possible* in JavaScript and, you might argue, things you can do in your sleep in plain JavaScript too… but they lead to an incredible amount of line noise, with temporary vars and brackets and parens all over the place.

Helping us express common patterns in as clean a way as possible is not at all about saving keystrokes, it’s about making a language that brings what you mean and what you write as close together as humanly possible, instead of forcing you to think about stupid implementation details and incidental complexity.

This is especially obvious if you’ve ever coded in Python or Ruby. You want to quickly loop through a hash, whip up a quick for … in loop, and notice that, err, this isn’t working at all. You want to see whether a string starts with a substring, look for something like str.startswith(substr) and realize that you’re going to have to make do with str.indexOf trickery, which is easy, but indexOf isn’t very descriptive now is it? You want to do something as simple as adding a few default arguments to a function or method, and realize that JavaScript simply has no syntax for such a common pattern. Now, I’m sure you’re thinking “well, but these things are super-easy in JavaScript, you just have to know how to do them” — but at that point you’d actually be arguing the inverse of your original claim, namely that the fact that JavaScript is harder to write and scan because it doesn’t abstract away these patterns doesn’t matter. Well, it does!

For anyone who does not care about what possibilities Scala provides to your coding style, it’s just Java with fancy syntax and some keywords replaced. You can use it wo write the same dull code as you could do in Java.

It’s the same with CoffeeScript vs. JavaScript.
You absolutely can use CS to write unreadable, incomprehensible, or simply sad bad code, but you can do as well in plain old JS.
But if people do not even try to adopt the new principles CS brings to your JS development then it is nothing but JS with fancy syntax and significant indentation.

I also agree, that the “function” becoming “->” is not one of the necessary parts of CS, even though I like it. But it just fits in the whole “this cleans up JavaScript” aspects.

I’m not convinced, that CS is the messiah for JS Coders, at all, but it definitely introduces some very nice possibilities to think about your code in a different way.

For example the “everything is an expression” paradigm:
JS functions always returned a thing (functions do that by definition) but it always could be undefined and ignored.
The implicite return for the latest statement in a function is just a way of bumping that into ones head, again.

Overall CS still is interesting and fun to write.