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0 pointsmahmud10y ago0 comments

Isn't CoffeeScript the "Macro-assembler" of JavaScript? i.e. a simple 1:1 syntax mapping, without no differentiating semantics of its own. Or am I wrong?

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lemevi10y ago· 2 in thread

It's neither a subset nor a superset of JavaScript. It's a language that isn't JavaScript that is compiled to JavaScript. There are to-JavaScript compilers for many languages now including Scala, Kotlin, Clojure and more. Maybe people who write CoffeeScript as part of some public thing consider themselves to be part of a JavaScript project, but I wouldn't.

klibertp10y ago

You know that "languages that compile to JavaScript" (thanks for not using the word "transpiled", btw) include JavaScript? Babel, Traceur - does it ring a bell? Would you argue that their users are not a "part of JavaScript"? What about TypeScript (it's just an implementation of some ES6 features + a powerful linter)?

Coffee is just a set of syntactic improvements (well, it's debatable - let's say "syntactic changes") over JavaScript. JS is too weak a language to implement this syntactic sugar inside of it, so there is a need for an external tool. But if you take a look at any Lisp, you'll see that people are building syntactic abstraction inside a language and that it doesn't make their code "a different language compiled to (their kind of) Lisp".

This is not to say that everything compiled down to JS is still JS. But the difference is quite neatly explained in Mathias Felleisen great paper: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.51.4... All that Coffee does are local transformations, equivalent to what you could do with Lisp or Nim or Dylan macros.

[EDIT: removed the "soooo cute" opening sentence, as it was brought to my attention that it distracted readers]

lemevi10y ago

> Soooo cute...

I stopped reading your reply after this. Just FYI, HN doesn't condone bad attitudes. You'll end up getting hell banned.

Having said that, my down-voted comments are factual. They are not incorrect, they were down voted by people who have strong emotions about CoffeeScript.

True or false? All the statements below are true.

Trix is writen in CoffeeScript?

CoffeeScript is not superset or a subset of JavaScript?

Are there other languages that compile to JavaScript?

I don't consider projects written in CoffeeScript JavaScript projects?

I gave simple statements of fact that were not incorrect, and they got down voted and emotional replies.

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