It can help Ruby developers to get going with Javascript because of its similar syntax, and it takes care of some of the bad parts in the language I've been wa

It can help Ruby developers to get going with Javascript because of its similar syntax, and it takes care of some of the bad parts in the language I've been watching the coffeescript bandwagon pick up passengers for a while now, but I simply am not convinced that creating a 'language' to simplify or 'improve' another one is a smart thing to do. Maybe on a team that has all Ruby developers this could fly, but now you make it hard to add pure javascript developers to your team without them first getting caught up on your way of doing things. And then to make things even more tedious, you make it compile to original javascript, an interpreted language. It just reminds me of how Rails initially tried to bake ajax into its way of doing things initially (and has since stopped ... but now we have to support that mess). If the top devs in our field are using it, then there's got to be some merit to it ... but I gotta say, it really doesn't seem all that clever to me.