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And without proper stack traces.

Don't get me wrong, I love coffescript, but it clearly is a hack.

The internet landscape would look very different if browsers had a standardized bytecode interpreter.

Not just a hack. Recognized developers such as Brendan Eich (creator of javascript) or Douglas Crockford (author of Javascript: The Good Parts) say that Coffeescript is good stuff. Coffeescript is a "transpiler", a source-to-source compiler wich translates a high level, very flexible and powerfull language such as coffeescript into plain old javascript. It doesn't change the underlying language at all, it keeps its object model and its data types. It just adds a more expressive and succinct syntax, inspired in python and ruby (and these languages have a very well deserved reputation for expressiveness and joy amongst programmers for a reason).

Source-level stack traces are coming, to Firefox first. I would imagine WebKit will follow. IE perhaps not, but, personally, I intend to ignore IE in future web apps, until it mostly catches up with the front runners.

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