LiveScript Review

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Review of LiveScript powered by the Slant community.

LiveScript is a language which compiles to JavaScript. It has a straightforward mapping to JavaScript and allows you to write expressive code devoid of repetitive boilerplate. While LiveScript adds many features to assist in functional style programming, it also has many improvements for object oriented and imperative programming.

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Pros

Pro
Designed for High-level functional code

LiveScript has terse syntax for common functional operations like map, and ships with a library, prelude.ls, with many of the functions most commonly used by functional programmers.

Pro
Good amount of programmer flexibility

There's a huge range of features that can make common tasks faster.

Pro
ECMA 6 Features

It is the declared goal of LiveScript’s creators to track ECMAScript 6. Hence, the language gives you ECMAScript 6 plus type annotations (which are optional).

LiveScript's module syntax is currently a bit behind the ECMAScript 6 specification (something that will be fixed eventually). It supports two module standards: CJS (Node.js) and AMD (RequireJS).

Pro
Fixes coffeescript scoping issues

= is used to declare variables in the current scope, in order to redeclare variables of outer scope := is used. This way bugs are reduced.

Pro
Supported by WebStorm and Visual Studio

Cons

Con
Strong functional lean

LiveScript is designed to be a high level functional language. For people who prefer a more imperative approach it can be hard to get used to.

Con
Compiles to unreadable javascript

JSON.stringify(
each(upCaseName)(
sortBy(function(it){
  return it.id;
})(
(function(){
  var i$, ref$, len$, ref1$, j$, len1$, ref2$, results$ = [];
  for (i$ = 0, len$ = (ref$ = table1).length; i$ < len$; ++i$) {
    ref1$ = ref$[i$], id1 = ref1$.id, name = ref1$.name;
    for (j$ = 0, len1$ = (ref1$ = table2).length; j$ < len1$; ++j$) {
      ref2$ = ref1$[j$], id2 = ref2$.id, age = ref2$.age;
      if (id1 === id2) {
        results$.push({
          id: id1,
          name: name,
          age: age
        });
      }
    }
  }
  return results$;
}()))));