Chapter 1. The road to CoffeeScript
This chapter covers
- Why CoffeeScript matters
- How to get started
- The evolution of JavaScript
- Adapting to evolution by using CoffeeScript
CoffeeScript is a small, general-purpose programming language. It was created by Jeremy Ashkenas and first released in 2009. It’s a compiled language: you write your program in CoffeeScript and then use the compiler to translate it to an equivalent JavaScript program. When you run your program, it’s the compiled JavaScript that runs. Think of your CoffeeScript programs as being JavaScript programs underneath.
There are many programming languages that can compile to JavaScript, so many that they might even outnumber the programming languages that don’t compile to JavaScript. ...
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