Definition

CoffeeScript can be referred to as a programming language that has the ability to compile into JavaScript. This means that when a person develops a code in CoffeeScript, and runs this code through a compiler, the resulting output is in the form of JavaScript.

By adding syntactic sugar, which has been inspired by Python, Haskell, and Ruby, this language attempts to increase the readability and succinctness of JavaScript.

History of the CoffeeScript Programming Language

The first Git commit of CoffeeScript was developed by Jeremy Ashkenas on 13th of December 2009. He introduced this first commit along with the comment that said “initial commit of the mystery language.” Ruby was used to write the complier of this language. Jeremy Ashkenas went on to introduce and announce the first ever documented and tagged release of CoffeeScript, version 0.1.0, on 24th of December during the same.

The first version of the language was replaced by version 0.5 on 21st of February 2010. The striking feature of this version was that it was a pure self-hosting CoffeeScript version without any Ruby compiler. By the release of the newer version, the project had garnered the attention of a large number of investors at GitHub. The page was also receiving a massive 300 hits per day.

The developments in the language continued with the introduction of stable 1.0.0 version on 24th of December 24, 2010. Ashkenas announced this version on Hacker News, which is the site on which the language was released for the first time.

The latest developments made in the language include the following

  • The introduction of source maps, which helps the users in the direct debugging of their CoffeeScript code. In addition to that, it also supports the trace backs of the language on runtime errors.
  • The support of Literate Programming in CoffeeScript through the use of the file extensions of coffee.md or .litcoffee. This feature enables the users of CoffeeScript to write their source codes in Markdown. Any indented blocks are then treated by the compiler as code – as this the method used by Markdown to indicate codes – the rest will then be ignored as comments.

The developments have increased the functionality and popularity of CoffeeScript programming language. As a result, it was announced by Dropbox, on 13th of September 2012, that they have taken the initiative of rewriting codebase for their browser-side codebase into CoffeeScript from JavaScript.

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