Advantages of CoffeeScript Over JavaScript

What is JavaScript?

It is a loosely typed language that is mainly used in development. We can use javascript both in frontend as well as backend development. The nature of programs is synchronous and executed line by line. You can run javascript on any system or browser as it contains a javascript engine.

What is CoffeeScript?

CoffeeScript is a subset of javascript in a naive way and is compiled into javascript internally. It is a lightweight language in nature, having user-friendly syntaxes which are contrary to the complex syntax of JavaScript. Many languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby, along with JavaScript, have influenced CoffeeScript.

Benefits of CoffeeScript compared to Javascript

Let’s see some of the benefits CoffeeScript provides in comparison to javascript −

• CoffeeScript comes up with easy-to-understand programming syntax compared to complex functions and expressions in Javascript. For Example, CoffeeScript only comes up with an option to use the === and !== operators to avoid the confusion caused by operators in javascript.

• There is a probability of reducing your code by more than 50% with CoffeeScript. Therefore, the developers can understand the prewritten codes in less time, which might increase their productivity in one way.

• Multiple programming languages, including python, inspire CoffeeScript; it uses the way indentation is used in python. It means there are spaces to differentiate the program.

• CoffeeScript contains a method to handle more than one return value, and it is mainly implemented with the use of destructing assignment syntax. This feature of CoffeeScript is influenced by C# language because it introduced a tuple.

• One more feature of CoffeeScript is inspired by C#, which uses switch statements. In the case of an accidental javascript fall, thoughts may happen, and CoffeeScript can automatically put a break after any switch or else statement to move out of the block.

• CoffeeScript has a feature of class-based inheritance for the code. Being a prototype language javascript doesn’t contain class features or any other Object Oriented Programming feature.

Syntactical Differences in Functions

It’s time to check the syntactical difference between CoffeeScript and Javascript −

Functions

If we declare a function in CoffeeScript, then it is going to look like this −

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

The same program in Javascript will look like this −

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

Indentation

Like python, CoffeeScript also uses whitespaces for indentation to separate blocks of code, while JavaScript uses curly braces to represent a block of code.

Syntax

CoffeeScript

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 neck-to-neck comparison between JavaScript and CoffeeScript with the help of a Table −

JavaScript	CoffeeScript
In JavaScript, different scopes like block, local, and global scopes create certain scope problems.	In CoffeeScript, there is no need to declare variables, reducing the scope problems to 0.
Bigger Code has a harder syntax to understand.	Smaller Code can be understood easily by the programmer as well.
Special characters like curly braces and semicolons are used for the indentation of the program.	Spaces are used for indentation purposes.
The JS compiler points out fewer syntax errors.	More syntax errors are pointed out by CoffeeScript, which are problematic.
Javascript is not dependent on any other programming language.	CoffeeScript is dependent on Javascript in case of any miscellaneous issues.

We could easily understand the advantages of CoffeeScript over javascript through this article.