CoffeeScript, 2nd Edition

Introduction

JavaScript was never meant to be the most important programming language in the world. It was hacked together in ten days, with ideas from Scheme and Self packed into a C-like syntax. Even its name was an awkward fit, referring to a language with little in common besides a few keywords. (For the story behind that, see Peter Seibel’s interview with Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, in Coders at Work [Sei09].) But once JavaScript was released, there was no controlling it. As the only language understood by all major browsers, JavaScript quickly became the lingua franca of the Web. And with the introduction of Ajax in the early 2000s, what began as a humble scripting language for enhancing web pages suddenly became a full-fledged ...