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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

CoffeeScript is supposed to be this nice Ruby/Python-esque sugar for JS. It does resemble those languages, but it's not nice, it's very... stabby. Indentation is unintuitive and makes code do completely different things (whereas in Python it just delimits blocks, and if you get it wrong the compiler will moan at you). Functions implicitly return the last value they produce. You can omit brackets in function calls - but only if there's arguments, otherwise you've accidentally made a NOP.

It's horrible. It's a nice idea, but the implementation leaves so much to be desired. It's bitten me before and so I avoid it now.

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Coffeescript is not perfect, however, nowadays people went crazy for ES6/ES2015, and suddenly nobody complains readability of babel output.

I've worked with both, ES6 is definitely a big progress on Coffeescript, but it takes like 80% of the things from coffee IMO, except the indentation syntax and list comprehension, added an `import` keyword.

My point is: don't complain about coffeescript while cheer at ES6, they are mostly the same.

Throughout its life, CoffeeScript has been by disparaged by those who just seem to really hate it's existence for some reason. At first it was "you can't debug generated code!", now that everybody is using generated code it's "coffeescript is the past, you don't want to live in the past do you?"

Except... CoffeeScript does all sorts of nice things that Babel does not. List comprehensions. Lack of == operator. Correct modulo operator. Block regexes. Triple-quoted strings. The @ syntax.

There is a strong cult-like vibe to the JS community, and I really find it off-putting. They have taken a technical limitation "Browsers only support JS" and turned it into a socially enforced rule "You may only use JS". Fuck 'em.

> My point is: don't complain about coffeescript while cheer at ES6, they are mostly the same.

No, they are really not.

ES6 does not change the semantics of the language. It adds a couple of new useful features, but it still maintains the basic readability of JS.

I've written production apps in both. With Coffeescript, I regularly encounter problems where the generated output is not what I expected given the input and the only way I discovered that was examining the output JS.

With ES6/Babel, I have literally never inspected the generated output. It's never produced code contrary to what I expect.

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