That's a fair point, and there are a few things I would point out in no particular order: The first is that CoffeeScript is ultimately a sort of dialect of Jav

That's a fair point, and there are a few things I would point out in no particular order: The first is that CoffeeScript is ultimately a sort of dialect of Javascript. CS and JS can interact with eachother seamlessly, so as mentioned in the OP article there's no need to switch over to CS for everything and/or all at once. Another important thing is that where possible CS tries to map relatively directly to JS, so for experienced JS developers they will recognize CS as a series of shortcuts which map to idioms they use constantly. If you are familiar with JS, doing a few small projects in CS should get you pretty familiar with it. CS is obviously somewhat immature, but I think it's reached the point where it can be considered for "serious work". I've found the tooling is pretty decent: coffee is slick with commands like --watch to recompile on changes, and coffee-mode for emacs is nice. There's also CS mode for vim, textmate, gedit, + more. Honestly the main hurdle is potential debugging problems, but I haven't found that to be too difficult either. Being mindful of how CS transforms your code, and strategic debugging code make the process for me not much different from debugging regular JS. So I'd say at this point I don't think CS presents hurdles which are terribly difficult to overcome.