The analogy is good, but there are parts of Afrikaans which are more complex than Dutch. Conjugating an adjective or negating a sentence, for instance. Are there parallels in CoffeeScript?
CoffeeScript is Afrikaans JavaScript
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Re: CoffeeScript is Afrikaans JavaScript
#22An underappreciated benefit of computer programming "languages" is how human begins use them to communicate with other humans. Once you get two or more programmers working on a project, they have to be able to write code that the other programmer can readily understand. Programming languages advance this goal to varying degrees; assembly does it poorly, and so does obfuscated C or Perl. CoffeeScript, on the other hand, seems to have borrowed language features that enhance this human-to-human communication ability: significant whitespace, easily comprehensible object models, etc.
Re: CoffeeScript is Afrikaans JavaScript
#23Like HAML before it, coffeescript is more like 'piglatin with shortcuts' to me, i.e. you have to mentally make a transformation on the javascript you were going to write while simultaneously stripping away unnecessary crud. This is somewhat analogous to the stage in learning a spoken language where you're mentally translating (rather than just articulating directly in the target language). Unlike a spoken language ho…
I speak only one language and found it pretty trivial to switch from JS to Coffeescript.
I guess it's always possible I have an innate capacity for languages I've never actually developed, though... :P
Re: CoffeeScript is Afrikaans JavaScript
#24It can help Ruby developers to get going with Javascript because of its similar syntax, and it takes care of some of the bad parts in the language
I've been watching the coffeescript bandwagon pick up passengers for a while now, but I simply am not convinced that creating a 'language' to simplify or 'improve' another one is a smart thing to do. Maybe on a team that has all Ruby developers this could fly, but now you make it hard to add pure javascript developers to your team without them first getting caught up on your way of doing things.
And then to make things even more tedious, you make it compile to original javascript, an interpreted language. It just reminds me of how Rails initially tried to bake ajax into its way of doing things initially (and has since stopped ... but now we have to support that mess). If the top devs in our field are using it, then there's got to be some merit to it ... but I gotta say, it really doesn't seem all that clever to me.
Re: CoffeeScript is Afrikaans JavaScript
#25Like HAML before it, coffeescript is more like 'piglatin with shortcuts' to me, i.e. you have to mentally make a transformation on the javascript you were going to write while simultaneously stripping away unnecessary crud. This is somewhat analogous to the stage in learning a spoken language where you're mentally translating (rather than just articulating directly in the target language). Unlike a spoken language ho…
I'm bilingual (English/Portuguese), and use both JavaScript and CoffeeScript.
And I'm not "intuitively comfortable" at all with CoffeeScript -- it has nice Python-esque features which I love, but its seemingly arbitrary parsing edge cases drive me mad.
But I think that one's comfort with using CoffeeScript depends entirely on their level of comfort and knowledge of Python and JavaScript. I don't feel like linguistic skills have any bearing. But it's an interesting idea!