JavaZone 2011 - CoffeeScript: JavaScript without the Fail
JavaScript. Love it or hate it, in the web development world it's impossible to avoid it. It was designed in one week by one man at Netscape, just to keep the browser from standardising on something even worse -- and it shows. Oh, it's not all bad, but the Good Parts -- which actually make up a pretty neat language -- are well hidden in among all the Bad Parts, which are there to make you, the JavaScript developer, suffer.
CoffeeScript is a language designed to take the Good Parts out of JavaScript and make a new, concise and beautiful language out of them. It runs anywhere JavaScript does -- in fact, it compiles to fairly readable JavaScript -- so you can already use it in your web applications and wherever else you've been stuck with JavaScript. In this talk, you'll learn what CoffeeScript looks like, how it relates to the JavaScript you know, and what new features it has to offer. In fact, if you already know JavaScript well, you'll probably be perfectly fluent in CoffeeScript after this -- it's that easy. And trust me, your life will be so much better for it.
Bodil Stokke
Bodil spends her days working as a Java developer at Steria, while silently plotting to overthrow the ancien régime, replacing current programming fashions with the Next Big Thing. She hopes the Next Big Thing will have lots of parentheses, but will settle for anything without checked exceptions.
She is on intimate terms with JavaScript and the web platform, having been the lead JavaScript developer on Scandinavia's biggest web based mapping application -- kart.gulesider.no and friends -- and has since taken an active interest in CoffeeScript and Node.JS as worthy challengers to the Ruby on Rails hegemony. After discovering CoffeeScript, she has almost completely stopped cutting herself.