Coffeescript, Hound, and Style questions

Javascript
1

I was looking at the coffeelint configuration file in Hound and had some questions about best practices, as I’m unsure of what to do in certain situations:

  1. Class declarations that go beyond 80 characters: is there a way to break the
    class ThisIsMyClassWithALongName extends ThisisABaseClassThatAlsoHasALongName class declaration statement into two lines? Inserting a line break before or after the extends seems to produce problems.

  2. Chaining methods: several Coffeescript style guides discourage the use of @ alone when it’s not attached to a method or property (such as like @_format). When building a set of chainable methods, is the preferred alternative to return this instead of ‘@’ at the end of the method?

2

That seems a bit arbitrary. The only reason I could think of is to discourage train wrecks or LOD violations. But as long as you’re returning the same type of object, you’re still within the spirit of the law as mentioned in Ruby Science.

I don’t know how returning this is any better than returning the @ alias. Maybe it introduces potential parser bugs with some levels of indentation or something like that?

3

The main argument I think of for never using @ alone is that if you only use this when you’re referencing the object alone, you are explicitly stating that your intention to pass or return the object itself. I’m curious if there’s another good reason that I might be missing.