Here’s the Deal

LiveScript vs Ruby (via Opal)

17 16

8 3

When comparing LiveScript vs Ruby (via Opal), the Slant community recommends Ruby (via Opal) for most people. In the question“What are the best languages that compile to JavaScript? ” Ruby (via Opal) is ranked 16th while LiveScript is ranked 27th. The most important reason people chose Ruby (via Opal) is:

Ruby has a very clean syntax that makes code easier to both read and write than more traditional Object Oriented languages, such as Java. For beginning programmers, this means the focus is on the meaning of the program, where it should be, rather than trying to figure out the meaning of obscure characters. presidents = ["Ford", "Carter", "Reagan", "Bush1", "Clinton", "Bush2"] for ss in 0...presidents.length print ss, ": ", presidents[presidents.length - ss - 1], "\n"; end

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

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
Elegant syntax

presidents = ["Ford", "Carter", "Reagan", "Bush1", "Clinton", "Bush2"]
for ss in 0...presidents.length
    print ss, ": ", presidents[presidents.length - ss - 1], "\n";
end

Pro
Popular

Ruby is one of the most popular languages for developing web sites. As a result, there's an abundant amount of documentation, sample code, and libraries available for learning the language and getting your project up and running. The most popular features are just 'gem install' away.

Ad
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
Meta-programming causes confusion for new developers

The ability for libraries to open classes and augment them leads to confusion for new developers since it is not clear who injected the functionality into some standard class.

In other words, if two modules decide to modify the same function on the same class can introduce a number of issues. Mainly, the order in which the modules are included matters. Since you more or less can't tell what kind of "helper" functions a module might write into any class, or for that matter, where the helper function was included from, you may sometimes wonder why class X can do Y sometimes but not at other times.