CoffeeScript
The official web site for CoffeeScript describes it very succintly:
CoffeeScript is a little language that compiles into JavaScript.
Not only is it a little language, it's a more beautiful one too. At its heart JavaScript is a flexible and powerful language that has been hamstrung with some fairly ugly syntax. CoffeeScript cleans JavaScript up and adds a host of useful features (such as list comprehensions).
Lots of people talk about how CoffeeScript is heavily inspired by Ruby, but writing CoffeeScript always reminds me of how much fun it is to code in Python.
Articles on CoffeeScript
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Using QUnit with CoffeeScript
QUnit is a unit testing framework for JavaScript, from the jQuery project. Earlier this week I wrote about how I chose it over Jasmine for my current project. This article explains how I setup QUnit to test my CoffeeScript, along with the Sinon mocking/stubbing library.
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QUnit or Jasmine?
My thoughts on the pros and cons of Jasmine and QUnit for testing CoffeeScript in Rails 3.2, and the criteria I used to choose between them.
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Using Ack with CoffeeScript
If you use the wonderful Ack search tool (it's a bit like grep) you may be wondering why it doesn't search your
.coffeefiles. It doesn't recognise them by default, but it's easy to configure.