Writing Eloquent JavaScript Without CoffeeScript

> He also completely misses the point about javascript's global-by-default variables and how easy it is to introduce them with typos

Using strict mode will avoid these kinds of mistakes.

Oscar, when your code itself is making little frowny faces at you after you write it, something has gone wrong.

  x == 1
  ? alert(x) 
  :(
     alert('Error'), 
     x = 1, 
     alert('All Fixed!')
  );

You should remember that you are not the only person that is going to be trying to read that code (unless it is a personal project, of course). Good layout helps other people read, understand and debug your code at a later date (as well as you at a later date, when you've long since moved on to other pojects in terms of active development work).

Also with Javascript's function-scoped variables and the fact it will let you declare them more than once in a given scope (the second and subsequent decleration being taken as either a NOOP or a basic assignemtn (if there is assignment with the decleration), declaring variables at the point of first use can be dangerous as it is easy, especially if you are messing around in global scope (which is to be availaded generally, but can't always be), to create hard to diagnose bugs due to variable values being clobbered because the same name is used elsewhere.

"I find if(...){} much more readable."

Not only is it more readable, it's more correct in the example given.

"if" is a statement. The ternary operator (?:) is an expression, that returns a value. The semantics are different, and using the ternary operator "merely" to replace an if statement, especially where no assignment of the ternary operator's return value is made, is a code smell.

The ternary operator is great if you're replacing a simple "if something assignment to X else other assignment to X." Any other use is questionable.

"CoffeeScript has been getting a lot of press and that's not a bad thing, but it's giving JavaScript a bad wrap.".replace(' wrap', ' rap')