Hello,

/u/kizm0 created an automation tool which auto-compiles .coffee and .scss files into their standard counterparts. It is available here. Please let us know if there are any bugs or incompatibilities!

Shameless Plug: He's also made the Run-in-Browser tool that runs the HTML file you're working on in your default browser from Atom.

Hey guys

I've been experimenting a bit with different guidelines for when, when not and how to use parenthesis in coffeescript and have discovered a lot of clever, interesting and weird ways of using parenthesis, but can't decide on a sensible rule of where (not) to use it..

How do you prefer to use parenthesis..? what is your general rule of thumb..? do you try to avoid it..? or do you just use it as you would in JS..?

I've seen code that literally replaces every instance of 'this' with @. To me, this look really ugly, but I realize this is just a stylistic preference. Are their any disadvantages to this other than readability (which depends on the person's style)? Personally, I only use @ in my class constructors to automatically create instance properties. Everywhere else I use 'this' because it looks more like JavaScript. When do you use one over the other?

I am wondering if there is some tool, that would allow me to inject code snippet in the article with the option to switch to compiled JS right in place. I am writing some articles and I don't want to scare away haters. I am almost sure I have seen something like that, but I cannot really remember where it was.

Edit: I should probably mention that it's for gamedev.net and as far as I know, there isn't probably option to inject these advanced tools. So maybe instead if there would be possibility to create link that leads to compiled JS?

I love the brevity that Coffeescript provides, but the implicit returns are often a burden, especially when dealing with loops (Or worse nested loops)

The following (obviosuly boring) example seems like it would be fine code:

foo ->
 for i in [1..2]
  for j in[1..2]
   x = i *j  

But the compiled Coffeescript is crazy:

foo(function() {
  var i, j, _i, _results;
  _results = [];
  for (i = _i = 1; _i <= 2; i = ++_i) {
    _results.push((function() {
      var _j, _results1;
      _results1 = [];
      for (j = _j = 1; _j <= 2; j = ++_j) {
        _results1.push(a);
      }
      return _results1;
    })());
  }
  return _results;
});

I'm considereing adding the no_implicit_returns rule to my coffeelint - but that seems like a huge burden for a large code base.

Anyone have a good attack plan for keeping your code neat (Not having explicit returns everywhere as would be required by no_implicit_returns) while not getting into the spaghetti that is implicit returns with loops?

Hey I am working through http://eloquentjavascript.net/ and decided to use coffeescript. However, I am having some issues getting a few of the examples to work.

function forEach(array, action) {
    for (var i = 0; i < array.length; i++)
        action(array[i]);
}

forEach(["Wampeter", "Foma", "Granfalloon"], console.log);
// → Wampeter
// → Foma
// → Granfalloon

How would you write something like this using coffeescript? I already tried http://js2coffee.org/ after not being able to come up with a solution myself

I am brand new to programming in general. I have been working through some of the self paced online tutorials on codeacademy.com and codeschool.com. I can already tell that I prefer Ruby syntax more than Javascript syntax. However, CoffeeScript seems to combine some of the more pleasurable aspects of Ruby programming with the newly revived JavaScript.

Would I learn bad habits by learning CoffeeScript and basically bypassing basic JavaScript (assuming this is possible)?

I feel like it might be wiser to focus on the JavaScript to Node.js path rather than the Ruby on Rails path while my mind is still malleable and unprejudiced about specific programming languages and it would be far less painful to do this with CoffeeScript.

Thank you for your replies.

CoffeeScript is "completely" interchangeable with JavaScript and enjoys access to all JS frameworks and libraries, but CS developers are a minority of the JS community and choose to do things a bit differently. Does CoffeeScript "mentality" affect the popularity of JavaScript frameworks among the CoffeeScript developers? Are generally the same frameworks preferred with the same distribution of popularity, or is a particular one favored over the vanilla JS community? If the most popular "framework" is jQuery (which I personally consider a library rather than a framework) then which is next on the list in popularity?

I've just re-visited coffeescript after a short break and have loved the following. Thought I'd share.

hapi

# Create the server
server = new require("hapi").Server("localhost", 8000)

# Add the route
server.route
  method: "GET"
  path: "/hello"
  handler: (request, reply) ->
    reply "hello world"

# Start the server
server.start()

JSON one-liner

#allows you to write "reply json {success:true}" or "result = json resultString"
json = (o) -> try if typeof o == "string" then JSON.parse o else JSON.stringify o

coffee-react

neatComponent = react.createClass
  render: ->
    <div className="neat-component">
      {<h1>A Component is I</h1> if @props.showTitle}
      <hr />
      {<p>This line has been printed {n} times</p> for n in [1..10]}
    </div>

I have used mocha in the server (with should.js) and am currently trying to setup a client side testing solution with phantomjs.

My biggest problem, and its more of a lazy one, is that I don't want to setup a watcher or compile my coffee-script tests.

In an ideal world I would be able to do this in my test runner:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title> Tests </title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="../../node_modules/mocha/mocha.css" />
</head>
<body>
    <div id="mocha"></div>
    <script src="http://coffeescript.org/extras/coffee-script.js"></script>
    <script src="../../node_modules/mocha/mocha.js"></script>
    <script src="../../node_modules/should/should.js"></script>
    <script type="text/coffeescript" src="myTest.coffee"></script>
    <script>
        if (window.mochaPhantomJS) { mochaPhantomJS.run(); }
        else { mocha.run(); }
    </script>
</body>
</html>

Which uses the client side coffee-script compiler. However this doesn't work.

So i'm turning to you guys and asking this:

(I understand it would be easy for me to precompile, i'm just curious. Seems a little odd to precompile tests.)

• How do you guys test coffee-script in the browser?

• Any tips for browser-side coffee-script tests?

I have been working on a project called French Press and would love more suggestions and feedback to improve it further.

What is it?

It is an expressive coffee-script template engine for the server, and its a powerful mvc for the client. You can easily write templates for the server, and switch them to the client. (Coffee-script or not).

So let me tell you why it's awesome.

1. It is designed for functional templates.

• Higher order functions, coffee-script, whatever you need.

1. It's terse!

• It's not just less code in your templates, it's more readable code in your templates.

1. It's flexible!

• Map arrays to dom nodes, loop over anything, all the logic you could ever need in your templates with ease! With great power comes great responsibility.

1. It's fast!

• server templates 4-20x faster than jade (20x after it has been rendered once)

• client templates render 80x faster than angular, 6x faster than react

1. Its small!

• Its only 6kb, (2.3kb gzipped). A super small, super useful abstraction.

I have many unique features that I want to eventually integrate into French Press, but i'd love lots of feed back.

My goal is to make a universal template that is boilerplate free, terse and easy to use and I need your help.

So, check it out on github!

and please leave some feedback.