I am now on my third project using coffeescript together with BackboneJS. On the second and third project, I am also teaching coffeescript to 3 people who had

I am now on my third project using coffeescript together with BackboneJS. On the second and third project, I am also teaching coffeescript to 3 people who had never written any coffeescript OR BackboneJS before. Granted, there is a fair amount of coaching involved, but the quality of the code produced is top notch, and the maintainability is _vastly_ improved compared to anything we've done in plain javascript before. This may be due to Coffeescript, and it may be due to Backbone adding some much needed structure, but I'd like to believe it's a combination of both and even using one in isolation should yield an improvement. If you are familiar with Javascript, picking up Coffeescript should be a breeze, and in my opinion, the benefits are there. On a closing note, you say that JS is ridiculously powerful which leads me to believe that you feel using CS means sacrificing some of that power. Since CS translates directly into JS, I think you'll find this fear is unwarranted.