Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

CoffeeScript

3.3K
1.2K
+ 1
1K
Haskell

1.4K
1.2K
+ 1
527
Add tool

CoffeeScript vs Haskell: What are the differences?

CoffeeScript: Unfancy JavaScript. CoffeeScript is a little language that compiles into JavaScript. Underneath that awkward Java-esque patina, JavaScript has always had a gorgeous heart. CoffeeScript is an attempt to expose the good parts of JavaScript in a simple way; Haskell: An advanced purely-functional programming language. .

CoffeeScript and Haskell belong to "Languages" category of the tech stack.

"Easy to read" is the top reason why over 197 developers like CoffeeScript, while over 72 developers mention "Purely-functional programming " as the leading cause for choosing Haskell.

CoffeeScript is an open source tool with 15.2K GitHub stars and 1.99K GitHub forks. Here's a link to CoffeeScript's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, CoffeeScript has a broader approval, being mentioned in 364 company stacks & 170 developers stacks; compared to Haskell, which is listed in 33 company stacks and 47 developer stacks.

Decisions about CoffeeScript and Haskell
Timm Stelzer
VP Of Engineering at Flexperto GmbH · | 18 upvotes · 607.8K views

We have a lot of experience in JavaScript, writing our services in NodeJS allows developers to transition to the back end without any friction, without having to learn a new language. There is also the option to write services in TypeScript, which adds an expressive type layer. The semi-shared ecosystem between front and back end is nice as well, though specifically NodeJS libraries sometimes suffer in quality, compared to other major languages.

As for why we didn't pick the other languages, most of it comes down to "personal preference" and historically grown code bases, but let's do some post-hoc deduction:

Go is a practical choice, reasonably easy to learn, but until we find performance issues with our NodeJS stack, there is simply no reason to switch. The benefits of using NodeJS so far outweigh those of picking Go. This might change in the future.

PHP is a language we're still using in big parts of our system, and are still sometimes writing new code in. Modern PHP has fixed some of its issues, and probably has the fastest development cycle time, but it suffers around modelling complex asynchronous tasks, and (on a personal note) lack of support for writing in a functional style.

We don't use Python, Elixir or Ruby, mostly because of personal preference and for historic reasons.

Rust, though I personally love and use it in my projects, would require us to specifically hire for that, as the learning curve is quite steep. Its web ecosystem is OK by now (see https://www.arewewebyet.org/), but in my opinion, it is still no where near that of the other web languages. In other words, we are not willing to pay the price for playing this innovation card.

Haskell, as with Rust, I personally adore, but is simply too esoteric for us. There are problem domains where it shines, ours is not one of them.

See more
Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn More
Pros of CoffeeScript
Pros of Haskell
  • 199
    Easy to read
  • 179
    Faster to write
  • 126
    Syntactic sugar
  • 104
    Readable
  • 104
    Elegant
  • 73
    Pretty
  • 53
    Javascript the good parts
  • 48
    Open source
  • 44
    Classes
  • 35
    "it's just javascript"
  • 16
    Compact code
  • 15
    Easy
  • 13
    Simple
  • 13
    Not Javascript
  • 2
    Does the same with less code
  • 1
    I'm jobs I'm software engineer
  • 90
    Purely-functional programming
  • 66
    Statically typed
  • 59
    Type-safe
  • 39
    Open source
  • 38
    Great community
  • 31
    Built-in concurrency
  • 30
    Built-in parallelism
  • 30
    Composable
  • 24
    Referentially transparent
  • 20
    Generics
  • 15
    Type inference
  • 15
    Intellectual satisfaction
  • 12
    If it compiles, it's correct
  • 8
    Flexible
  • 8
    Monads
  • 5
    Great type system
  • 4
    Proposition testing with QuickCheck
  • 4
    One of the most powerful languages *(see blub paradox)*
  • 4
    Purely-functional Programming
  • 3
    Highly expressive, type-safe, fast development time
  • 3
    Pattern matching and completeness checking
  • 3
    Great maintainability of the code
  • 3
    Fun
  • 3
    Reliable
  • 2
    Best in class thinking tool
  • 2
    Kind system
  • 2
    Better type-safe than sorry
  • 2
    Type classes
  • 1
    Predictable
  • 1
    Orthogonality

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of CoffeeScript
Cons of Haskell
  • 3
    No ES6
  • 1
    Corner cases in syntax
  • 1
    Parentheses required in 0-ary function calls
  • 1
    Unclear what will be grouped to {…}
  • 9
    Too much distraction in language extensions
  • 8
    Error messages can be very confusing
  • 5
    Libraries have poor documentation
  • 3
    No good ABI
  • 3
    No best practices
  • 2
    Poor packaging for apps written in it for Linux distros
  • 2
    Sometimes performance is unpredictable
  • 1
    Slow compilation
  • 1
    Monads are hard to understand

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

- No public GitHub repository available -

What is CoffeeScript?

It adds syntactic sugar inspired by Ruby, Python and Haskell in an effort to enhance JavaScript's brevity and readability. Specific additional features include list comprehension and de-structuring assignment.

What is Haskell?

It is a general purpose language that can be used in any domain and use case, it is ideally suited for proprietary business logic and data analysis, fast prototyping and enhancing existing software environments with correct code, performance and scalability.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

What companies use CoffeeScript?
What companies use Haskell?
See which teams inside your own company are using CoffeeScript or Haskell.
Sign up for StackShare EnterpriseLearn More

Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

What tools integrate with CoffeeScript?
What tools integrate with Haskell?

Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

Blog Posts

What are some alternatives to CoffeeScript and Haskell?
JavaScript
JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.
TypeScript
TypeScript is a language for application-scale JavaScript development. It's a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.
ES6
Goals for ECMAScript 2015 include providing better support for large applications, library creation, and for use of ECMAScript as a compilation target for other languages. Some of its major enhancements include modules, class declarations, lexical block scoping, iterators and generators, promises for asynchronous programming, destructuring patterns, and proper tail calls.
Babel
Babel will turn your ES6+ code into ES5 friendly code, so you can start using it right now without waiting for browser support.
jQuery
jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML.
See all alternatives