Just some short notes about CoffeeScript, after maybe 5 hours of playing with it. This is mostly about the syntax – but then again, CoffeeScript is mostly about the syntax.
I like it, overall, it’s definitely a step up from JavaScript. Though it is a bit of a “works 90% of the time” design: it quickly gets unintuitive once you come to the corner-cases. There’s a bit too much implicit stuff in the syntax for my taste – but it’s certainly pretty clean and noise-free (at least in simple cases).
Nice features include:
Function application chains can be written without parentheses:
foo a # like foo(a)
foo a b c d # like foo(a(b(c(d))))
foo a b,c,d # like foo(a(b, c, d))
So it basically gives you an automatic compose – it doesn’t, however, do an automatic curry:
foo = (a, b) -> a+b # like foo = function(a, b) {return a+b;}
foo a # could/should return "(b) -> a+b" but doesn't
Also, combined with some of the other expression-oriented syntax (especially list-comprehensions) one can basically write arbitrarily confusing constructs:
foo x for x in [1, 2, 3] # like foo(1); foo(2); foo(3);
foo (x) for x in [1, 2, 3] # same as above
foo (x for x in [1, 2, 3]) # like foo([1, 2, 3])
My first comment isn’t quite the whole truth – the whole first line is also an expression and that expression evaluates to [1, 2, 3]:
bar(foo x for x in [1, 2, 3])
# behaves like foo(1); foo(2); foo(3); bar([1, 2, 3])
Let’s try and refactor that:
result = foo x for x in [1, 2, 3]
bar(result)
# behaves like foo(1); foo(2); foo(3); bar(3) -- whoopsy!
Well, that’s the price one has to pay for the extreme terseness.
splats 1
Then, there’s a feature they call “splats”. Which is a stupid name, but that’s because “splats” are actually three distinct features and the name basically refers to the lexical token “…” and not to a semantic concept.
The first “…” usage is for rest-args in function definitions:
foo = (a, b...) -> # b is a list
# equivalent Scheme code:
# (define (foo a . b) (#| b is a list |#))
What is nice, is that (unlike in Scheme) this works not only for the last parameters, but everywhere (where it makes sense):
foo = (a..., b) -> # a contains all but the last parameter
splats 2
Feature number two is splicing arguments in function calls (basically syntactic sugar for apply):
list = [1, 2, 3]
print list # like print([1, 2, 3])
print list... # like print.apply(null, [1, 2, 3])
Splicing literals and expressions works, too. And you can combine spliced arguments with non-spliced ones – though not on the REPL (at least in 1.6.3), since it’s broken. And the last activity on a related bug is “reopened 2 months ago”.
That doesn’t quite fill me with enthusiasm for CoffeeScript, I have to say… (The REPL is also a bit cumbersome to use – one has to manually switch into multi-line mode in order to enter line breaks.)
Some other corner-cases also work (even on the REPL, yay!):
foo = -> [1, 2] # (function w/o arguments)
do foo # (call that function, returns [1, 2])
print do foo # like print([1, 2])
print do foo... # like print(1, 2)
splats 3
The third “splats” usage is in “destructing assignment” from lists and objects:
[head, stuff..., tail] = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
# stuff will be [2, 3, 4]
# (except on the REPL, where it will fail)
That’s really nice, but why they use brackets on the left side of the assignment is beyond me. PHP does something semantically similar (list(a, b, c) = array(1, 2, 3)) – but that’s wrong, people! The whole point about the left side of such an assignment is that it is not a list.
COBOL
CoffeeScript also has that whole Perl-like reverse-if stuff:
x = "foo" if y == "bar"
Python has that too (Whoops, no, I was misremembering here: Python only has the “x = can_fail() or default_value” idiom) – and Python also loves code that reads like simplified English sentences. But CoffeeScript is in a whole other league:
while player isnt dead
if key is space then jump quickly upwards unless status is jumping
Given a bunch of trivial definitions, this is absolutely valid CoffeeScript code. I don’t know if they want to win over the COBOL crowd with this nonsense, or what is going on here. I just know I don’t like it. (One doesn’t have to write in that pseudo-readable style, of course – though the tutorial does make it clear that this is the preferred way to do things).
As I see it, this is basically the underlying theme of CoffeeScript: syntactic cuteness.
There is a syntax for array slices, in which two dots denote an inclusive end, and three dots denote an exclusive end – cute, yes, but also a new record for the least amount of pixels that are wrong per off-by-one error.
Also, consider:
ls = [0, 1, 2, 3]
ls[0..3] # is [0, 1, 2, 3]
ls[..] # is [0, 1, 2, 3]
ls[0...3] # is [0, 1, 2]
ls[...] # is [0, 1, 2, 3]
ls[0....3] # is []
ls[0.....3] # is a parse error
ls[0....999999999999999999] # is [0]
ls[0...999999999999999999] # is [0, 1, 2, 3]
ls[0..999999999999999999] # is [0, 1, 2, 3]
ls[0.999999999999999999] # is 1
# bonus:
ls[..->] # is [0, 1, 2, 3]
ls[...->] # is []
ls[.."3"] # is [0, 1, 2, 3]
ls[..."3"] # is [0, 1, 2]
ls[.."x"] # is [0, 1, 2 ,3]
ls[..."x"] # is []
Unlikely that a programmer would write one of the stranger examples, but if CoffeeScript had macros, or a preprocessor, it would be quite difficult to use. But it doesn’t. It just has cute syntax.
There’s another “cute” thing, ?=, which sets a variable to a value when the variable is undefined or null:
x = null
x ?= 3 # if x is null or undefined, set it to 3
But you have to declare the variable first, which kind of defeats the whole point. If you don’t want to do that, you can use the following instead:
x = x ? 3 # set x to 3 if x doesn't exist
But pay attention to not write it as
x = x? 3
Because that always sets x to undefined. (No, I don’t know why.)
The ? also has an accessor variant, as in:
object?.key
Which returns undefined if key doesn’t exist in object. So that’s nice, especially for longer chains (on the other hand – longer chains of objects returning objects aren’t exactly good code to begin with).
Which brings us to the whole hash-table/object stuff, but that’s stuff for another post.
Happy Hacking!
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