Alright so I wrote my first program in CoffeeScript. It’s my first pass at a blackjack simulator. My thoughts:

• Syntax is quick and easy to learn, and fun to use.
• I love the function definition syntax. Love love love.
• Same goes for re-opening classes.
• Scoping can be tricky when passing functions around, but it allows for a lot of power.
• For loops are ugly
• I need to learn how to do operator overloading
• JavaScript is missing a lot of stuff. Need to figure out the ActiveSupport equivalent for JS.

All told it only took me a couple hours to skim through the PragProg CoffeeScript book and hack this up. It went fast and I was pleased with how easily I was able to refactor the code as I built it up. Next I’m going to mess around with adding browser-side features, as well as running it in Node. And I’m going to figure out how to test it.