Advantages of CoffeeScript over JavaScript

What is JavaScript?

It is a loosely typed language mainly used for development. We can use javascript in both front-end and back-end development. The nature of the program is synchronous and executed line by line. You can run javascript on any system or browser as it contains javascript engine.

What is CoffeeScript?

CoffeeScript is a subset of javascript that is internally compiled into javascript. It is essentially a lightweight language with a user-friendly syntax, as opposed to the complex syntax of JavaScript. Many languages ​​such as Perl, Python, and Ruby, as well as JavaScript, have influenced CoffeeScript.

Advantages of CoffeeScript compared to Javascript

Let’s look at some advantages of CoffeeScript compared to javascript -

• Compared with complex functions and expressions in Javascript, CoffeeScript provides easy-to-understand programming syntax. For example, CoffeeScript only provides the option to use the === and !== operators to avoid the confusion caused by operators in javascript.

• It is possible to reduce code by more than 50% using CoffeeScript. Therefore, developers can understand the pre-written code in less time, which may increase their productivity to some extent.

• Multiple programming languages, including Python, inspired by CoffeeScript; it uses the indentation method in Python. This means that programs have room to differentiate.

• CoffeeScript includes a way to handle multiple return values, which is mainly implemented using destroying assignment syntax. This feature of CoffeeScript was influenced by the C# language because of its introduction of tuples.

• Another feature of CoffeeScript inspired by C# is the use of switch statements. In the event that javascript fails unexpectedly, the idea is that CoffeeScript can automatically place a break after any switch or else statement to move out of the block.

• CoffeeScript features class-based code inheritance. As a prototyping language javascript does not contain class functionality or any other object oriented programming features.

Syntactic differences of functions

Time to check the syntax differences between CoffeeScript and Javascript -

function

If we declare a function in CoffeeScript then it will look like this -

increased_value = (value) -> (value+1)

The same program in Javascript would look like this -

var increased_value;
increased_value = function (value) {
   return value + 1;
};

indentation

Like python, CoffeeScript also uses spaces for indentation to separate code blocks, while JavaScript uses curly braces to represent code blocks.

grammar

Coffee Script

for x in [1..50]
   if x%5==0
      console.log "#{x}"

Same code in JavaScript -

var i, x;
for (x = i = 1; i <= 50; x = ++i) {
   if (x % 5 === 0) {
      console.log(`${x}`);
   }
}

Here is a side-by-side comparison of JavaScript and CoffeeScript with the help of a table -

Through this article we can easily understand the advantages of CoffeeScript over javascript.

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