why i will never write javascript ever again*

Why I will never write JavaScript again*

LA CoffeeScript 10/22/14

Why I will never write JavaScript again*

LA CoffeeScript 10/22/14

*the“no really, I don’t hate JavaScript” version

–You

“Wait, Who is this guy and what the hell does he know about JavaScript?”

Hi I’m Wolff!• A little about me:

• Señor Frontend Engineer @ The Noun Project

• Active community of designers

• Nearly 70,000 icons in SVG/PNG

• New API http://api.thenounproject.com

• All around cool person…

• Avid pizza aficionado

• Wanted to be a playwright not a developer

Wolff’s Backstory:• Accepted to school for Playwriting

• Me: “That’s a terrible fucking idea”

• Me: “I’ve made a website before, why not do that?!”

• Made the logical choice to go to art school for programming 😕

• Worked in iOS (hated it)

• 2nd Frontend dev barackobama.com

• Relaunched thenounproject.com on new NP API

http://barackobama.com

http://thenounproject.com

What we'll cover

• A brief history of JavaScript!

• Intro to CoffeeScript !

• Why I will never write JavaScript again* (AKA Why CoffeeScript is good for you and your team)

(AKA Why CoffeeScript isn’t just hipster crap)

Wolff Storytelling Break:

–CS Major

“Wait, what exactly are building your website with?”

–Wolff

“Uh… well JavaScript. Of course.”

–CS Major

laughing “JavaScript isn’t a programming language, it's a

half-assed scripting language.”

–Wolff

😢

A brief history of JavaScript

1993/2014

Code Smell designed by Arthur Shlain from the Noun Project

Your Grandpa’s JS (93/03)

• “This shit’s f***’d!” -pretty much everyone

Medieval JS (04/08)

• Enter modern web applications:!

• Gmail

• OMFG AJAX!!!!

GTFO JAVASCRIPTERS!

• JavaScript was considered a novelty

• Unwelcome at the proverbial big kids table.

• Only called upon when our skills were needed to do terrible things to the DOM.

However, we're not

in 2007 anymore 😉

(*…and we all know that CS Major ended up writing Java and hates his life)

Modern Day Awesomeness

JavaScript 2014

Knife designed by Nathan Driskell from the Noun Project

JavaScript is FAST!!!!

High powered JS engines:!!

V8, Nitro (SquirrelFish Extreme), Rhino,

Spidermonkey etc. etc. !!

({Lots of fucking animal names})

Rocket designed by James Fenton from the Noun Project

JavaScript is Glamorous

Writing Server-side JavaScript doesn’t have to

suck anymore:!!

Node, npm, yoman, Grunt, Gulp etc. etc.

!!

({install all the things})

JavaScript is

still a pain in the ass

({💩});

Hell is other people’s JavaScript

({This has been all of us, admit it.})

Spaghetti Code

({Be honest. You’ve written some.})

Modern solutions to code organization

• Unit tests

• Modularization

• Project patterns

• etc.

JavaScript is improving!

• But it will be approximately 8 years before we don’t have to worry about crappy backwards compatibility.

But there has to be more…

• Leaves some still wanting more organization

• What I call the human factor

• JavaScript syntax isn’t for humans

Intro to CoffeeScript

Coffee designed by Jacob Halton from the Noun Project

CofeeScript is Not JavaScript

• No syntactical bloat

• ({ Banish curly braces forever! });

• Write more like a human

Write like a sane human

CoffeeScript is Not JavaScript

• (w)rappers; (w)rappers; (w)rappers

• CoffeeScript:

!

• JavaScript:

!!

for input in form.find(“input")!$input = $(input)

_ref = form.find("input");!for (_i = 0, _len = _ref.length; _i < _len; _i++) {! input = _ref[_i];! $input = $(input);!}


• Closures (OMFG!)

• handles scoping for us

• no need for var!

• all variables will be correctly scoped and declared efficiently


• smarter objects (thanks to baked-in patterns)

• JavaScript doesn’t bind functions by default.

• I say: “FUCK THAT SHIT!”


• Binding functions in CoffeeScript:

class Wolff!!! awesome: false!!! getPizza: =>!!! ! @awesome = true

• Otherwise use -> for private functions


• Other perks

• Simple prototypal chaining

• class Array extends Array!

• super classing of methods

• Literally just include super


• Compiles!

• Grunt / Gulp etc.

• ability to do imports and concatenation on multiple JS files


• CoffeeScript Caveats:

• Bad for shoehorning

• "Let's get coffeescript working for our _______ CMS”

• Legacy JS can be tricky

Why I will never write JavaScript ever again*

*I don’t want to hate JavaScript anymore.


• Readability #A.K.A. the human factor

• People might look at your code and not want to kill themselves


• Machines read machine code / humans write human code

• most important thing about CoffeeScript


• Standards - assets should never, NEVER be committed to version control

• machines read machine code

• code that is read by the browser should be uglified, minified, gzipped (pretty much unreadable by humans)

Production JavaScript

({Optimized for machine input})


• Don't be the developer that complains about a JS lib being over 10k and then then doesn't uglify/min/AND Gzip

• Much easier to have libraries handled via package management

• npm, bower, etc.


• Remove the boiler-plating

• less brackets and syntactical bloat

• live ({free})

You know you’re a JavaScripter when? …

({We’ve all been there})


• Efficiency comes built in

• Programmers can go about their day solving problems

• CoffeeScript handles efficiency under the hood


• Think more like an engineer, even when you're wearing your developer hat

• JR devs can worry about solving day to day problems

• less hacking / more planning

Why I will never write JavaScript ever again?

CoffeeScript makes JavaScript more human for

you and your team.

In Summation

• Make things simpler on yourself

• We all know you survived JSLint.

• We’ve all been there

In Summation

• Focus more on what’s important

• organization

• code cleanliness

• efficiency

In Summation

• Have more fun:

• The future of JavaScript is exciting!

• Worry less, enjoy more

In Summation

Enjoy the future of JavaScript!

🚀

Thanks!

Questions?Twitter: @seawolff

Noun Project: @thenounproject

why i will never write javascript ever again*

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