

Ten Features I Like About CoffeeScript - jashkenas
http://openmymind.net/2012/5/16/Ten-Features-I-Like-About-CoffeeScript

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mistercow
The amazing thing about CoffeeScript is that most of what it does is tiny
little changes that _shouldn't_ matter that much, yet the overall effect is
huge. For example, string interpolation involves _one_ fewer character than
concatenation, yet the effect on readability would be hard to overstate.

A similar feature in another language is PHP's ability to mix in with HTML. It
would be utterly trivial to convert the HTML sections of a PHP file to echo
statements. Yet this tiny bit of sugar goes a huge distance toward making up
for the language's short comings (also known as "almost everything else about
PHP").

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ef4
My single favorite thing about CoffeeScript seems tiny, but makes a huge
difference: the chainable existential operator.

It's gotten to the point where I keep trying to use it in Ruby and getting
annoyed that it's not there. Rails at least adds Object#try, but it's not
nearly as nice.

~~~
gmac
There's also the andand gem, but again it's a lot less clean and expressive
than a simple ?.

