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Comment by lightcatcher | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else prefer the syntax of javascript to that of coffee script? Really, my only problems with javascript are no multi-line strings and type coercion (but type coercion issues are mitigated by always using ===). Otherwise, I think javascript is a fine language. Also, the with statement isn't that bad in my opinion.

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I'm with you on that one. The only thing I feel that really needs improvement in javascript is the long-winded lambda syntax, seeing as they're used so much. Everything else I'm perfectly fine with. Honestly, most of what coffeescript brings is fewer keystrokes, at the cost of ambiguity. I don't see the purpose.

And I'm sorry, but whitespace-for-blocks really kills it for me. I can't stand it in python, but I'll suffer through it for the ecosystem. Coffeescript brings nothing to the table for me.

Significant whitespace is a big turn off for me too. What you gain in concision for small examples you more than lose in tooling and code manipulation.

Why would significant whitespace impede tooling? If the compiler can parse it, why can't your refactoring tools?

Because you can't automatically re-indent code. In a language like C or Javascript, I can just copy, paste and move chunks of code around and have pristine re-indentation with a keypress. In Haskell, Python, or Coffeescript I have to be very careful and have to manually re-indent if I want to move code or change scopes.

Whitespace is much better left as a purely aesthetic feature, IMO.

I used the think the exact same thing. However, after spending some time with tools that do consider white space significant (coffeescript, haml, sass) I have come to prefer it. It's part noise reduction and part consistency between devs and environments that I prefer.

I've been burned many, many times in python by the indentation.

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