Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/spider-exciting-alternative-javascript/
Spider is one of the new languages that try to improve our codes by providing more reliability. Some could certainly describe it as CoffeeScript with JavaScript syntax, but such description would fail to emphasize the real benefits of Spider.
Spider contains a lot more unique and interesting concepts than most alternatives like CoffeeScript. While the latter is certainly more mature than Spider, we get some nice options by choosing the language named after the eight legged arthropods. If we just want to experiment a little bit with yet another language, search for a trustworthy JavaScript alternative, or try to write less and do more, Spider seems to be a good candidate.
Basic Concepts
Spider is designed around its slogan, It’s just JavaScript, but better. This means we won’t get a compilation type system or type checker of any kind. We also won’t miss our beloved C-style syntax with curly brackets for blocks, round brackets for function calls, and square brackets for arrays. Finally we also don’t see a custom VM on top of JavaScript or anything else to break compatibility with existing JavaScript code. Yes, this is really JavaScript.
The creators of Spider realized that there is no point in debating static versus dynamic languages. Each one has their advantages and disadvantages. The reason for choosing the full dynamic side with Spider is simple: JavaScript is already dynamic and interacting with otherwise dynamic code gets a lot simpler when the language embraces a dynamic type system.
There are two more important things that should be mentioned here:
- Spider is compiled to JavaScript (i.e. transpiled)
- Some features are inspired from languages like Go, C#, and CoffeeScript
The files are not transpiled to older versions of JavaScript, but to the most recent standard ECMAScript 6. To guarantee support across most browsers, Spider uses Google’s Traceur to generate ECMAScript 5 compatible files. What this means is that Spider is already taking advantage of future improvements, with the current output being backward compatible.
Continue reading this article on SitePoint