As a former C programmer who truly loves C... I wouldn't use it DIRECTLY for anything except things that couldn't be done in any other language, things where yo

As a former C programmer who truly loves C... I wouldn't use it DIRECTLY for anything except things that couldn't be done in any other language, things where you really need that fine-grained memory control for performance or deeper technical issues. By all means, wrap code in more abstract languages! I feel the same about Coffeescript. A while back, I spent a couple of months as a full-time Javascript coder. I like a lot of things about JS, but the line-noiseish syntax (especially around callbacks and anonymous function declaration) was damned annoying. Compared to its elegant-syntax contemporaries like Ruby and Python, it felt awkward. Coffeescript is a hack, yes, but it's a nice one. It plagiarizes some of the best syntax ideas from more graceful languages (list comprehensions, splats, whitespace significance, etc), and adds them to the good ideas and functionality of JS. I agree that in order to write good Coffeescript, you should be able to write good Javascript too, in order to see the gotchas. But that doesn't mean a preprocessor is a bad thing, not if it gives this much readability and functionality. Sadly, I think there's a bit of machismo involved in the sneering at Coffeescript, not a real technical issue.