CoffeeScript instead of JavaScript

Short and Strong

© Mikko J. Pitkänen, fotolia.com

© Mikko J. Pitkänen, fotolia.com

Article from Issue 147/2013
Author(s):

Through the years, many languages have tried to improve or even replace JavaScript, including CoffeeScript, which runs in all JavaScript Runtime Environments and compiles into JavaScript.

Back in 2009, Jeremy Ashkenas had a huge amount of work on his desk. Full of zeal, he published in quick succession several versions of a new programming language with the goal of its being easier to read than JavaScript yet translate into JavaScript code. Just two years later, the Ruby on Rails project integrated what has since been dubbed the CoffeeScript [1] language.

In September 2012, Dropbox announced that it had ported the complete JavaScript code of its browser client to CoffeeScript [2]. The figures published by the cloud storage service are impressive: The Dropbox client code shrank by about 21 percent.

Cold Coffee

CoffeeScript, however, is not a completely new language. Ashkenas took good old JavaScript, replaced a couple of the more complex constructs with more readable abbreviations, and seasoned it with some Haskell and Ruby. For example, instead of saying

[...]

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