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I miss the existential operator like the deserts miss the rain

foo?.bar?().baz?.boo




Truly. That operator has most of the gravity that pulls me towards coffeescript.

Lodash things, like _.isNil staunch the bleeding, but it's just.. not the same.

I wrote coffeescript for 3 years, and the first 2 or 3 months was a frustrating learning curve. By the end of that job I really drank the koolaid. Coffeescript can be blissful. The complaints about invisible delimiters and stuff resonated with me for the first 2 weeks, but then I just learned it like you learn anything. If you are unsure what's going to happen, add extra parenthesis. I kept a window with js2.coffee on it so I could paste uncanny snippets while I was getting up to speed. After I got over the curve I stopped needing it.

I think it was more frustrating in the beginning than learning most things because I knew JS pretty well prior and it felt like I was throwing my experience out the window. I'm glad I did it though. Writing coffeescript was really quite pleasant. Now regular javascript has jumped forward a bit and has somethings coffeescript doesn't, I still feel like the one true web language exists somewhere between them.

I'm leading a project right now and every couple of days I get that coffeescript itch. Caffeine is hard to put down once you're addicted.



Just found this. https://github.com/rongierlach/babel-plugin-syntax-exists not the worst workaround in the short term. Better than lodash's _.get but worse than coffeescript. :P




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