Tuesday, April 19, 2011

This is huge: CoffeeScript becomes the default Javascript in Ruby on Rails 3.1

You will be hearing more about the CoffeeScript language now that the popular web-framework Ruby on Rails has adopted it as the default Javascript for their next release.   This is a huge event in the life of a little language that is just over a year old.  The V1.0 release was in December of 2010.

I adopted CoffeeScript as my language of choice somewhere in mid 2010.  It has the deep elegances of Ruby, including introspection.  It uses the indentation-based block structure that makes Python such a pleasure.  It's basically a mashup of my two favorite languages and it targets an almost ideal runtime: Javascript.  CoffeeScript is a self-hosting compiler that emits Javascript, so your code can run in a browser, or on NodeJS as a command-line server side language like Ruby or Python.  It's fast.  NodeJS is a port of Google's V8 Javascript engine into a POSIX framework.

CoffeeScript is one of those tools that is just beautiful in its simplicity.  It's pleasing to the eye, powerful, and easy to wield.


Some Details about the new features in Rails 3.1
Intro to CoffeeScript