I'd like to respond to a few of the comments here.
Jeremy imagines correctly. This blog post was essentially a continuation of the subject on the node mailing list, and particularly the assumption that if you feel you shouldn't compile to JS, then you should just write in Assembly, or that JavaScript is only worth using if you want to be "closer to the metal". I believe that these points of view are wrong.
Yes, of course I'm aware that C++ was originally cross-compiled to C. That's why I chose it for the analogy, like Lassie on display in the Louvre. People tend to take comparison that as either a compliment to CoffeeScript, or an insult, depending on their feelings about C++ vs C. I consider both interpretations to be correct.
I have no problem with people compiling to JavaScript, though I personally prefer dealing with JavaScript directly. I like stack traces with line numbers that correspond to the line numbers in my editor, and it's not such a bad language. One of the biggest things I've found lacking with both Node and Browser JS is post-hoc debugging. Syntax sugar doesn't help with that. I'd be much more excited about efforts to produce state-capturing crash dumps that would let a developer revisit an error condition and investigate it after the fact. Other language have this, and it makes me very envious.
"Expressiveness" is a measure of how many tokens are required to write programs. Read some of pg's essays about arc and blub. A less than 10x increase would still be relevant, but.. well... meh. It's not a major leap in power that Assembly to C is, or C to JavaScript is.
Increases in expressiveness often come at the cost of also increasing the difficulty of reasoning about programs' precise behavior, but increase the ability to reason about their intent. Reading assembly isn't exactly fun (in my opinion), but it's also quite clear exactly what the computer is doing -- so much so that it can be tricky to figure out exactly what the human was trying to accomplish.
C is much more humane, and still pretty clear what's going on. It's an obvious sweet spot for many tasks. JavaScript, on the other hand, runs on this huge black box, but it's much more expressive than C (and thus, much easier to write), and it runs in web browsers (which makes it inescapable), doesn't require a compilation step, and is quite fast for a lot of tasks. I've yet to see any similar leap from a to-JS language. They're just other high level languages that all have pretty much the same basic set of features. A lot of them are a bit nicer than JS, but they lack JavaScript's relevance factor.
I must not be a very good writer, because people often read things I write, and seem to come away with the impression that I have these strong prescriptive views about syntax and coding style. I don't. The reason I'm so unenthused is because most high level languages don't really seem to differ all that much. Coding style doesn't solve very many problems, and the problems it does solve aren't particularly hard.
Jeremy imagines correctly. This blog post was essentially a continuation of the subject on the node mailing list, and particularly the assumption that if you feel you shouldn't compile to JS, then you should just write in Assembly, or that JavaScript is only worth using if you want to be "closer to the metal". I believe that these points of view are wrong.
Yes, of course I'm aware that C++ was originally cross-compiled to C. That's why I chose it for the analogy, like Lassie on display in the Louvre. People tend to take comparison that as either a compliment to CoffeeScript, or an insult, depending on their feelings about C++ vs C. I consider both interpretations to be correct.
I have no problem with people compiling to JavaScript, though I personally prefer dealing with JavaScript directly. I like stack traces with line numbers that correspond to the line numbers in my editor, and it's not such a bad language. One of the biggest things I've found lacking with both Node and Browser JS is post-hoc debugging. Syntax sugar doesn't help with that. I'd be much more excited about efforts to produce state-capturing crash dumps that would let a developer revisit an error condition and investigate it after the fact. Other language have this, and it makes me very envious.
"Expressiveness" is a measure of how many tokens are required to write programs. Read some of pg's essays about arc and blub. A less than 10x increase would still be relevant, but.. well... meh. It's not a major leap in power that Assembly to C is, or C to JavaScript is.
Increases in expressiveness often come at the cost of also increasing the difficulty of reasoning about programs' precise behavior, but increase the ability to reason about their intent. Reading assembly isn't exactly fun (in my opinion), but it's also quite clear exactly what the computer is doing -- so much so that it can be tricky to figure out exactly what the human was trying to accomplish.
C is much more humane, and still pretty clear what's going on. It's an obvious sweet spot for many tasks. JavaScript, on the other hand, runs on this huge black box, but it's much more expressive than C (and thus, much easier to write), and it runs in web browsers (which makes it inescapable), doesn't require a compilation step, and is quite fast for a lot of tasks. I've yet to see any similar leap from a to-JS language. They're just other high level languages that all have pretty much the same basic set of features. A lot of them are a bit nicer than JS, but they lack JavaScript's relevance factor.
I must not be a very good writer, because people often read things I write, and seem to come away with the impression that I have these strong prescriptive views about syntax and coding style. I don't. The reason I'm so unenthused is because most high level languages don't really seem to differ all that much. Coding style doesn't solve very many problems, and the problems it does solve aren't particularly hard.