CoffeeScript

CoffeeScript

Paradigm	Multi-paradigm: prototype-based, functional, imperative, scripting
Designed by	Jeremy Ashkenas
Developer	Jeremy Ashkenas, et al.
First appeared	2009
Stable release	0.6.2 / May 15, 2010 (2010-05-15)
OS	Cross-platform
License	MIT License
Filename extensions	.coffee
Website	http://coffeescript.org
Influenced by
JavaScript, Ruby, Python

CoffeeScript is a programming language that compiles statement-by-statement to JavaScript. The language adds syntactic sugar inspired by Ruby and Python to enhance JavaScript's brevity and readability, as well as adding more sophisticated features like array comprehension and pattern matching.

Examples

A common JavaScript snippet using the jQuery library is

$(document).ready(function() {
  // Initialization code goes here
});

In CoffeeScript, the function keyword is replaced by the -> symbol, and indentation is used instead of curly braces (except when defining an associative array), as in Python. Also, parentheses can usually be omitted. Thus, the CoffeeScript equivalent of the snippet above is

$(document).ready ->
  # Initialization code goes here

Compiling

The CoffeeScript compiler has been written in CoffeeScript since version 0.5, and can be run either in the browser or in Node.js.

External links

• CoffeeScript.org - Official site
• GitHub repository