CoffeeScript: another language to not learn

My attention was drawn to CoffeeScript recently. I really like it, I think the author has made some changes that if they were part of javascript proper would make it somewhat nicer to work with. But it is completely pointless.

I mean no disrespect - if it solves a problem for the author then I can't argue. All I can say is that I completely missed the point. It isn't even fundamentally changing the way javascript works, no original programming paradigm or domain-specifc problem solving tools.

What it's ended up as is some syntax sugar taken variously from several popular languages around at the moment. It doesn't technically improve your javascript app at all and it adds a learning curve and complicates development and deployment by adding a compile phase.

CoffeeScript is just for fun

Fair enough. I can't slam anyone for doing something for fun. And no-one has claimed this to be the new best thing or a must-use tool so I'm not going to start my flamethrower without real provocation!

To the author: I think the syntax is nice, the features I can see being nice to have and you've done a really excellent job on the site/docs. In general though, this seems like a huge amount of effort for basically no gain.