CoffeeScript

December 25th, 2009

CoffeeScript is a little language that compiles into JavaScript. Think of it as JavaScript's less ostentatious kid brother — the same genes, roughly the same height, but a different sense of style. Apart from a handful of bonus goodies, statements in CoffeeScript correspond one-to-one with their equivalent in JavaScript, it's just another way of saying it.

CoffeeScript. Very cool.

CoffeeScript provides a new, clean, and elegant syntax for that JS we are familiar with. Brought to you by Jeremy Ashkenas, one of the developers who are responsible for underscore. Still alpha and not recommended for your next serious project, though.

JavaScript has increasingly become the target language for a variety of compilers, but so far none of them have gained wide popularity. What is holding them back? I think that the thought of debugging compiled JavaScript is scaring developers off. ParenScript attempts compiling readable code with variable names in tact and white-space preserved; this seems to be the route CoffeeScript is following as well. Is this enough to keep debugging from being a nightmare?

See also:

• ParenScript
• Cappuccino & Objective-J
• Pyjamas
• GWT

PS: There is a whitespace-significant experimental branch in the works. Cool.

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