During this year I’ve introduced my self into the world of front-end web development. I’ve never been a fan of the web as a development platform, but I have to admit that the web seems to be the unavoidable platform of the future. During my adventures with web development, I had to deal with Javascript, of course. My opinion about this language is not different from almost everyone else’s: It’s a language with good intentions which ended up being not so good. No wonder why is the most “WTF” language in Stack Overflow. After some months of continuously writing Javascript, I got used to it.
Parallel to my daily JS programming, I’ve been looking for alternatives. These come mostly in the form of languages that compile to Javascript. I decided to try CoffeeScript after watching a cool video titled Better JS with CoffeeScript by Sam Stephenson from 37signals. CS is a nice little language inspired by Ruby, Python and others. I used CS for some small toy projects. It’s very cool and it has a strong community.
Probably the most striking feature of CoffeeScript is that it’s just Javascript. There is almost no semantic changes between them. The difference is purely aesthetic. This has some interesting advantages: 1. Debugging is not a problem because CS can be compiled to human readable JS. 2. CS can easily interoperate with any existent JS code. The main disadvantage is that CS fixes none of the fundamental problems of JS.
I feel that writing CS is much better than writing JS. However, it took me a while to realize that reading CS is most of the time harder than reading JS. I realized this when reading my own code a few months later. My conclusion is that CoffeeScript’s design has a strong focus on writability, but not on readability. There are two factors that contribute to this in my opinion: 1. The design has a preference for implicit stuff. Some important tokens such as parenthesis, curly brackets, commas and others are optional. This leads to ambiguity in the code that must be resolved by precedence rules and creates code that is very hard to read. 2. The language adopts Perl’s motto: “There’s more than one way to do it“. This ends up in code with too much different idioms, making things hard to read. I personally prefer Python’s motto: “There should be one and preferably only one obvious way to do it“.
A detailed description of all the readability problems in CoffeeScript deserves its own post. I’ll leave that for later. Meanwhile, I decided not to code in CS anymore. I don’t really see any value on it. I’ll go with plain Javascript when necessary, and I’m also exploring new alternatives such as Google Dart and ClojureScript.
Manuel Cerón 