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Perhaps I'm missing the point here, but I don't get why there's such a hype over CoffeeScript. People seem to prefer learning a brand new language in order to avoid getting proficient in another language they already (should) know. Or in other words, people prefer to learn a language that will code another language for them. Its like I'll go and learn Japanese just so I can use it to write phonetic English.

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In the case of CoffeeScript, the appeal, in my mind, is that it's _not_ a brand new language, it's just an improved syntax and some extra language features over what is essentially plain old JavaScript. Anyone who already grasps the fundamental concepts of JavaScript can master CoffeeScript in a matter of hours. Of course, the syntax is a matter of taste, and one might prefer something like JavaScript 1.8, which comes with the same new language features as CoffeeScript, and more. But some of us (and I suspect we come mostly from Python and Ruby) prefer the concise syntax of CoffeeScript over all those curly braces and semicolons.

Well, its true the syntax of CoffeeScript is trivial, and coming from Python background myself I find it very easy to comprehend. But I also find Javascript fairly easy to work with and to be honest I rather work on my target language without the abstraction of another (at least in the case of JavaScript). Take the javascript issues covered in the presentation - they are not hard to work with as long as you treat them as part of the Javascript package (for example, var your local variables to make them local. not hard to make into a habit).

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