It's snowing, and I'm on my nth cup of coffee, and I'm going to talk a little bit about Coffee Script. Full disclosure: I found out about this from a post someone made a while ago over on Forrst but that's not the right place for a rambling blog post.

I've been meaning to try CoffeeScript out for a while now, and since I've started a new, mostly-straight-html website for a client I figured it was a good chance to leap in. I haven't got very far yet, but I'm hopeful. A potentially interesting thread just started up asking Do We Need More Programming Languages? but it hasn't got a lot of momentum yet.

CoffeeScript is a new language, of sorts, and then again it's an old language. It interests me. And nobody else is talking about it here. It's a syntactic re-write of javascript. Confused? No need, just read the blurb. In short, it takes a syntax more similar to Python than much else, and compiles it to javascript. So it'll work in any browser, just like JS. It'll work with frameworks, like jQuery. It'll work with anything that uses javascript - you just have to remember to compile it and not let your cow-orkers make changes to the JS files when you're on holiday.
Because it compiles to JS, it doesn't have the problem of needing popular support. You don't have to use it. If it disappears from view, in five years someone can simply delete it, look instead at the JS it produces and work from that.

Syntax-wise, well, I love me a bit of Python these days. I like the way CS takes the best of that awesome language and the best of JS. Example code looks extremely clean and readable. Obviously, that's cherry-picked for the website, but the potential is there.

I'm saying all this, but I haven't compiled anything yet. I'm just psyched by the idea. If it plays out, I might even do some sort of tutorial. If not... I'll deny everything.