Why CoffeeScript Isn't the Answer

Ok, so if CoffeeScript is just JavaScript, add the parenthesis. If you need brackets to make a section of code readable or compile to "certain" JavaScript, then add them. Even the programs I work on we add parenthesis, brackets, etc for readability. Use CoffeeScript to increase productivity. Nowhere does CoffeeScript say you must use white space instead of brackets and such. Keep it simple and easy, classes are also nice; I'll be reading those are articles soon as well to gain less of a bias.

Ironically - he doesn't it's kind of the whole flaw in the series.

How is JavaScript a minefield? Well, JavaScript has all sorts of pitfalls lurking for the developer. Each pitfall is like a mine in the minefield, silently waiting for you to accidentally step on it. Just like the minefield, JavaScript’s mines are hidden in plain sight. Entire books have been written about all the mines present in JavaScript. Maybe I’ll get into what some of those are in future blog posts.

So then he goes into why Typescript/Coffeescript/Dart aren't the answer to the "Javascript minefield" though he doesn't actually describe the mine's he's trying to avoid. He's not even bothering to setup a strawman to knock down. Its kind of hard for any tool to solve an undefined problem.

Sometimes I think that most CoffeeScript, ClojureScript, etc. programmers are people who were advanced in other languages before they learned JavaScript. There are quite a few programmers who have no issues with these "bad parts" or "really bad parts" because they cut their teeth on them, and these numbers are growing: Most people now learn JavaScript as their first language. JavaScript already won, and things like CoffeeScript are the last gasp of the old regime.

This article proves not that CoffeeScript is flawed but that Jeff Walker doesn't understand how to use it. For instance, his first example is:

    # BROKEN
    func 5, {
       event: (e) -> 
         if e.something
           36
         else
           45,
       val: 10}

Anyone with more than a day's experience with CoffeeScript knows that it's much better to express this with the simpler:

    # far better
    func 5,
       event: (e) -> 
         if e.something
           36
         else
           45
       val: 10

Note how just dropping the excessive notation makes the intention clearer while also making the code cleaner.

His example on variable capture neatly illustrates a few of the opinions of CoffeeScript that actually make it far easier to reason about code: don't use global variables, and if a variable has the same name, it should refer to the same thing. It's far more confusing to allow rampant variable shadowing. Code that relies on variable shadowing is simply broken.

His last example shows a fundamental misunderstanding of not just CoffeeScript, but JavaScript generally. Granted `this` binding can be sometimes confusing, which is why CoffeeScript has a fat arrow (`=>`) to automatically capture `this`.