Here’s the Deal

LiveScript vs Earl Grey

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When comparing LiveScript vs Earl Grey, the Slant community recommends LiveScript for most people. In the question“What are the best languages that compile to JavaScript? ” LiveScript is ranked 27th while Earl Grey is ranked 29th. The most important reason people chose LiveScript is:

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.

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Common Questions

What are the best languages that compile to JavaScript?

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

Pro
Powerful hygienic macros

Earl Grey's macro system allows for creating powerful control structures that look just like builtin ones. EG also supports macro libraries which allows developers to provide their macros/DSLs for others to use.

Pro
Pattern matching

Pattern matching is an incredibly powerful tool that, once you've tried, you cannot live without. This is not your average hacked-together pattern matching but a complete and integral feature to the language.

Pro
ECMAScript 6 Asynchrony

Earl Grey provides Promises based on ECMAScript version 6 and as many NPM libraries already implement. Earl Grey also provides a promisify function that converts old-fashioned callback-style asynchrony to promises.

Pro
Fully compatible with Node.js ecosystem

Anything available on NPM can be used just as easily with Earl Grey. In fact, everything else can be used too! Earl Grey has interfaces to Browserify, Webpack, and even experimental support for SystemJS. Earl Grey can even be used to generate npm packages that any node-compatible language can use!

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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$.push({
          id: id1,
          name: name,
          age: age
        });
      }
    }
  }
  return results$;
}()))));

Con
Not true static typing

EG gives you the tools to implement your own type-checking inside of argument lists and elsewhere but there's no analysis done at compile-time like other compile-to-js languages.