Clean up generated CoffeeScript code about chaplin HOT 6 CLOSED

I've learned CS quite recently and I'm amazed by little details that really improve javascript as a language. Though, I tend to really despise the generated code and I feel I lose control over my code at the end.

This article is the perfect exemple (thanks for sharing). Plus, I finally don't really like the syntax (never liked indentation based languages). Granted the code is short, but at the same time quite unreadable. When I look at some Chaplin files, it is quite obscur where a statement end. For exemple, bla: -> is quite a confusing way to create an empty function.

@molily How do you personally feel about coffeescript?

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If you'll be cleaning up the stuff coffee shits, I recommend using return instead of plain undefineds, because it's used in js.

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@karellm: Like any programming language, CoffeeScript itself is dumb and inefficient in its generality. When writing Chaplin I had a look on the compiled code most of the time. I didn’t use some of CoffeeScript’s features even when they could be used because they might get compiled to inefficient, overly complex and incomprehensible code.

Using CS is surely a tradeoff, it has its downsides. But in total it’s easier to write decent CoffeeScript code then consistent, performant and safe JavaScript code. CS gives you strict mode per default and enforces rules you would need to check with ugly tools like JSHint instead.

Currently I don’ have an issue with the generated JS code. Some things are superflous like IIFEs, return statements, list comprehensions. But they do not impair the performance significantly. Probably three or four kilobytes could be saved if we switched to bare JavaScript and try to optimize by hand. After minification and compression, this is probably half a kilobyte. So it’s not a priority for me at the moment. I doubt that the code would be more readable in the end. Many people praised the readable code of Chaplin, only a few were scared off because it’s mainly written in CS.

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@paulmillr I like that idea better. I would even make sure that empty function return.

@molily Makes sense. Beside performance, I guess my main issue really is the readability. I tend to like curly braces :)

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Can this be closed now?

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Fot the time being, yes. In the long term I’d like to define the return values of all methods more explicitly. At the moment, most return values are quite random because we’re relying on implicit returns. Basically, all methods which do not have a meaningful return value should return undefined in the end. At least in my humble opinion.

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