032 RC CoffeeScript Rails Coach

CoffeeScript is a language written by Jeremy Ashkenas that compiles to Javascript. Its syntax is much more friendly than native JavaScript. Especially if you're used to languages like Ruby or Python.

As or Rails 3.1, CoffeeScript is available by default and a coffeescript file is created in /app/assets/javascripts every time you run the scaffold generator.

A few of my favorite features of the language are:

I can ignore parenthesis (mostly), semi-colons, and curly braces
Function notation
Objects with nested notation
Variable safety (not creating globals)
Splats on lists
Classes
Always returns last expression
String interpolation

I don't like:

Operator aliases

Resources:

CoffeeScript Webpage
CoffeeScript Cookbook
CoffeeScript Basics (video)
CoffeeScript: The Cool Parts (video)