I think the key point he makes (even though it's almost throwaway at the end of the paragraph) is that the community is rapidly declining. I agree with you comp

I think the key point he makes (even though it's almost throwaway at the end of the paragraph) is that the community is rapidly declining. I agree with you completely on the syntax: it's not my bag (I prefer writing plain [ES6] JS), but idiomatic CoffeeScript is remarkably expressive. But the decline, which is undoubtedly accelerating, is problematic. I'm busy ripping CS code out of several big Rails apps simply for the sake of maintainability going forward. Good CoffeeScript code is not quite 1-to-1 translatable to/from JS; it's a simple language, but it is an actual language with its own constructs. I feel it's important to make it as easy as possible for others to maintain code I've written, and using JavaScript makes that easier than having it written in another language. The Bluebird comparison I think is off for that reason - Bluebird is a JS library: you only need to know the API, it's still JS. If a developer understands promises, there's no great step between native and Bluebird. (I totally agree with what you're getting at btw, I just think [maybe for the worse, maybe not] that it is pragmatically better, with the advent of ES6, to stick to JS; TypeScript maybe gets a let-off here as it's just a thin layer on top, not a different language).