Even though JavaScript is a powerful language, it has drawback like the structural programming style.

CoffeeScript, on the other hand, is a language that compiles into JavaScript. The underlying idea for CoffeeScript is ‘JUST JavaScript!’. CoffeeScript enables you to produce the JavaScript without writing as much code as you have done previously with JavaScript.

Introduction to CoffeeScript

The History of CoffeeScript :

CoffeeScript originated on DEC 13, 2009 by Jeremy Ashkena. He released CoffeeScript 0.1.0 with documentation and a compiler written in Ruby.

In 2010, CoffeeScript 0.6.0 was released and this time the compiler was replaced by the compiler written in CoffeeScript itself.

In 2012, Dropbox announced that its browser side code-base replaced JavaScript with CoffeeScript.

On February 2013, CoffeeScript 1.5.0 was a significant release supporting ‘Literate Programming’.

Why CoffeeScript is good for you :

There are plenty of other languages out there, so what makes CoffeeScript the 11th most popular language in Github ? Why should you learn CoffeeScript?

CoffeeScript 2

The main purpose of CoffeeScript is to produce efficient JavaScript without writing much code. CoffeeScript also focuses on highlighting all the good aspects of JavaScript with simple syntax.

CoffeeScript has been inspired by Python, Ruby and Haskell, it adopted syntax & coding styles from them, which makes it very unique & Useful. CoffeeScript Produces one-third amount of script that original JavaScript does. JavaScript is at the core of CoffeeScript, so its good and advisable to learn JavaScript First which makes CoffeeScript more familiar to you.

The advantages of CoffeeScript :

There are numerous advantages over JavaScript, some of them are :

  1. Very Little Coding is involved when programming in CoffeeScript as compared to JavaScript.
  2. All the good features of JavaScript are present in CoffeeScript.
  3. You can use any existing JavaScript library seamlessly with CoffeeScript.

Disadvantages of CoffeeScript :

  1.  When you are using CoffeeScript, there is an additional compilation step involved in the process.
  2. Only a few resources are available for this language.

Purpose of CoffeeScript is to remove all the rough edges from JavaScript and provides a smooth way of programming in JavaScript.