A Case Against Using CoffeeScript

Post by cheald » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 6:58 AM UTC

premchai21 wrote: post #74

cheald wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah; regular old Lua 5.1. The colon syntax is just syntactic sugar -- self isn't actually bound. function Foo:Bar(baz) is the same as Foo.Bar = function(self, baz); invoking Foo:Bar("rebar") is sugar for Foo.Bar(Foo, "rebar"). self is never bound - it's just passed in (explicitly, via . syntax, or implicitly, vs : syntax). In all cases, the caller is always specified. You can pass Foo.Bar around (as it's a function r…

What do you mean “isn't actually bound”? The function being defined using colon syntax doesn't close over self, since it's a parameter—but functions defined within that function will close over the self parameter, since it's a local from an enclosing scope: foo = { x = 3 } function foo:bar(baz) return function(thud) return thud + baz + self.x end end womble = foo:bar(4) womble(7) --> 14 Python I believe also closes o…

Post by jeswin » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 7:17 AM UTC

ryanflorence wrote: post #55

chc wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Go ahead and [do this horrible thing], it's not _that_ bad. Sure. Let me insert a few things that can have really bad side effects that I still think you should do: • Leave your house every day (car crashes ROFLstomp homicide as a cause of death) • Eat food (most foods have some ill effect on your body) • Write some code in C (it's a very unsafe language, but sometimes necessary) • Use a computer (hurts your eyes a…

Source maps will be helpful, but I still can't put a break point in my coffee script from the browser.

Post by lloeki » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 8:29 AM UTC

cheald wrote: post #2

The increase in debugging complexity is a fair point, and it does add an extra step in between finding a problem and fixing it. However, in practice, I'm not sure I've ever had this be a major problem; I've had more problems related to bad error messages from the Coffeescript compiler (generally due to significant-whitespace errors) than I have had in trying to associate Javascript to its source Coffeescript. The res…

    getUser = (id) ->
      url = "users/#{id}"
      dfd = $.ajax
        url: url
        format: 'json'
        method: 'get'
      url: url
      promise: dfd.promise()

    getUser = (id) ->
      url = "users/#{id}"
      dfd = $.ajax
        url: url
        format: 'json'
        method: 'get'

      url: url
      promise: dfd.promise()

Post by sirclueless » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 9:28 AM UTC

ryanflorence wrote: post #78

jrockway wrote: post #30

My code is more readable for me than yours. That’s just how it is. While the JavaScript CoffeeScript compiles looks decent, it’s still not mine. That would change if you practiced reading other peoples' code. When I see my code, I often think, "yeah, I wrote this" because I know how I name things, but other than that, my code looks like everyone else's code. I know this because I based my style on what other people d…

> That would change if you practiced reading other peoples' code. I'm really active on github, and actually read the source code of a lot of projects instead of reading books, and contribute to a bunch of them too. Quite assuming of you to assume I don't. My code, since I wrote it, will always be easier to understand because I dealt with every problem--not because of the style.

Post by judofyr » Wed, Dec 14, 2011, 9:47 AM UTC

jashkenas wrote: post #61

wycats wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First-class functions have the `this` problem in every language, and the fat arrow is very nice syntactic sugar for what you have to do anyway Not true. JavaScript's `this` binding is absolutely not the only way to do it. In Ruby: class Foo def hello return proc { self } end end puts Foo.new.hello.call #=> # In Python: class Foo(object): def hello(self): def zoo(): return self return zoo zoo = Foo().hello() print(zoo…

So, this is really interesting... JavaScript is forced to make the pessimal choice of only ever having dynamic-bound "this", because of that favorite whipping boy ... prototypal inheritance. If JavaScript had a notion of a class (even as a constructor function + prototype) definition, then it would be possible to tag methods with the correct instance reference, as in Ruby and in Python. Unfortunately, because the sta…

    Klass.method := lambda { p self }

    // Let's call this a "prototype function"
    Klass.prototype.function method() {
      …
    }