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A comment on The Great CoffeeScript to Typescript Migration of 2017. Parent comment

Re:The Great CoffeeScript to Typescript Migration of 2017 by sings on Friday May 15, 2020 @08:38PM (#23199252)
Personally I’ve also always found Coffeescript easier to read and more pleasurable to write because of its syntax, especially its reliance on white-space. But it seems this is one of those things that really divide people into two groups.

My only bug bear about coffee was its lack of a concise ternary, but it’s use of is/or/unless worked well for me.

I’m a bit sad that my Coffee/Pug/Sass/Yaml stack is supported out of the box in fewer places than it was, all sharing principles of less punctuation, and for me, more clarity as a result, but community support is pushing me towards migrating back to vanilla JS. Glad that some features are coming across, but things like destructuring aren’t as powerful (no [first, middle..., last]). Will be happy to see nullish coalescing come over.

I think the typing thing is relevant for big teams, something I’ve had the luck of avoiding for the most part.

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Re:The Great CoffeeScript to Typescript Migration of 2017 by jrumbut on Friday May 15, 2020 @10:31PM (#23199972)
Unless is hugely valuable to me, "do x unless y" is great when x should happen in almost all cases.

It avoids the noise of if statements, I really miss it in languages that don't have it.

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Re:The Great CoffeeScript to Typescript Migration of 2017 by jbergknoff on Friday May 15, 2020 @11:18PM (#23200202)
I have a really hard time parsing `unless`. Whenever I encounter it in Ruby or CoffeeScript code, it takes me 10-30 seconds to stop and understand what's happening with the code.

Generally, postfix conditionals are a bad idea because they are garden-path sentences [1] by design.

Glad you find them valuable, but IMO they epitomize what many other comments in this thread have said about CoffeeScript's poor readability.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

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Re:The Great CoffeeScript to Typescript Migration of 2017 by st1ck on Saturday May 16, 2020 @09:17PM (#23208604)
I don't see anything common in structure between postfix `unless` and examples of garden-path sentences, which seem to be based on word ambiguity. Nothing is ambiguous in e.g. `print(x) unless x != 0`. Although admittedly without syntax highlighting, conditionality it's less obvious.
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Re:The Great CoffeeScript to Typescript Migration of 2017 by jessaustin on Saturday May 16, 2020 @09:04AM (#23203055)
You're right, coffeescript's refusal to use python's more sensible ternary idiom ('normal' if condition else 'abnormal') is strange, especially since it already has the useful trailing-if idiom ('normal' if condition).
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