Vanilla JS is perfectly fine and there are a ton of people out there who are using it every day on a highly professional level. There is a huge amount of tooli

Vanilla JS is perfectly fine and there are a ton of people out there who are using it every day on a highly professional level. There is a huge amount of tooling these days and specially the Node.js community and ecosystem are flourishing. Code coverage, static analysis, test frameworks for every use case imaginable, you name it. Coffeescript and its brethren are a "solution" for people who are not interested in JavaScript and don't care about performance / maintainability in the long term. The additional compile step and the resulting problems with not being able to know exactly what it ends up generating become a huge burden in the long run. If you're really good in JS, you know what we'll be JIT'ted and what not, just like a really good C++ developer knows what the compiler will eventually optimize away and what not. Seriously, building your cool, new library in <Insert Fancy New Compile to JS Language here> is like writing the latest addition to Boost in C89. Nobody wants to depend on it in the long run. From what I have seen, the people who are mainly using things like Coffeescript are coming from Ruby or Python and want their cool-aid back. If you don't want to learn a language, don't use it and if that means you won't be able to do stuff on the web, well I'm totally fine with that. I've seen enough code that looked like a J2EE developer just started coding C the other day.