It's actually become one of my favorite languages. JavaScript is a terrific language and coffeescript capitalizes on this. The source code just becomes so clear and concise, and I really like how the language was designed. I still get hung up on lexical scoping, but that is my bad. Does anyone know how to use constructor like attr_accessor? Anyway I love writing coffeescript.
I really enjoy CoffeeScript now. It is what I use for browser and node.js development. Before I tried it, I was somewhat skeptical of using it because I felt my javascript knowledge would fade or I might get confused about things, but I think it has enhanced my knowledge of JS because I don't just blindly use CS without knowing what the output is in JS.
I had the bare fundamentals of JavaScript down (constructors, the prototype object, anonymous functions/callbacks) and I did quite well once switching to CoffeeScript. I really recommend using the coffeescript.org "Try CoffeeScript" feature so you can see what your CoffeeScript gets compiled into. One thing I wish I understood better going into it was function scope or scope in general, I remember getting caught up on this quite a bit. I definitely have an easier time turning my thought into code using CoffeeScript, YMMV.
Thanks Jeremy! I think CoffeeScript is a wonderful replacement for JavaScript, it made client side code so much nicer to write for me. Been using it since 0.7 (?).
As somebody who learned CoffeeScript before JavaScript, I have to say I very much appreciate it when people use CoffeeScript in all manner of examples.
CoffeeScript does have really nice syntax for OOP, but I think JavaScript deserves some lovin' too. Well-written JavaScript (such as Backbone) looks pretty beautiful. Another plus is that new devs (if you have to worry about that sort of thing) don't have to learn a new language.
Truly. That operator has most of the gravity that pulls me towards coffeescript.
Lodash things, like _.isNil staunch the bleeding, but it's just.. not the same.
I wrote coffeescript for 3 years, and the first 2 or 3 months was a frustrating learning curve. By the end of that job I really drank the koolaid. Coffeescript can be blissful. The complaints about invisible delimiters and stuff resonated with me for the first 2 weeks, but then I just learned it like you learn anything. If you are unsure what's going to happen, add extra parenthesis. I kept a window with js2.coffee on it so I could paste uncanny snippets while I was getting up to speed. After I got over the curve I stopped needing it.
I think it was more frustrating in the beginning than learning most things because I knew JS pretty well prior and it felt like I was throwing my experience out the window. I'm glad I did it though. Writing coffeescript was really quite pleasant. Now regular javascript has jumped forward a bit and has somethings coffeescript doesn't, I still feel like the one true web language exists somewhere between them.
I'm leading a project right now and every couple of days I get that coffeescript itch. Caffeine is hard to put down once you're addicted.
Coffeescript is also great for being terser, making it dead simple to create classes (with executable bodies like ruby) and setup prototype inheritence, for comprehensions, for each iterations, and pattern matching. Also, the generated javascript code is very easy to read. I've replaced all my JS for coffee for 3 months (even making a firefox plugin with it) and never looked back.
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