Coffeescript is a dialect for (mostly) people who don't like brackets (also cool but controversial features like null swallowing with ?, implicit function calls

Coffeescript is a dialect for (mostly) people who don't like brackets (also cool but controversial features like null swallowing with ?, implicit function calls, etc.), while babel is a transpiler to take es6 down to es5. Saying one is a substitute for the other is like saying ice-cream mud-cake is a substitute for steak and lobster at a restaurant - if it's Saturday night and or your cheat day, just eat both. That is, pipe the output of your coffeescript into the input of your es6 babel in your build step. I personally use a ton of emberjs with ember-cli, and ember-cli-coffeescript actually just straight-up ships this build pipeline for you when you decide to use coffee. P.S.: Sorry if I sound like Marie Antoinette saying "let them eat cake", yes, I realize I am lucky to not have tons of legacy code that prevents me from altering my build step, and that there are thousands of other less-lucky engineers who are stuck with build systems that are essentially unalterable voodoo.