Here’s the Deal

LiveScript vs Parenscript

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When comparing LiveScript vs Parenscript, 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 Parenscript is ranked 35th. 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
It is Common Lisp

Lisps are easy languages to learn (once you get past the parens) and Common Lisp is a very practical dialect.

Pro
Run almost identically on both the browser and server

Parenscript code can run almost identically on both the browser (as JavaScript) and server (as Common Lisp).

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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
The syntax may be hard to learn

Being an implementation of Lisp, Parenscript's syntax may seem cryptic and hard to understand for people not used to it. While Lisp has very little syntax compared to other languages and it's generally considered pretty terse, there's still an initial overhead in learning the language.