The comparisons made in the GP have very little in common. The Java:Scala distinction is not similar to that of ASM:C, and neither has a similar relationship to that of HAML:Erb. So there are many objections that can be made to the analogy, especially that the analogous relationships provided are not even analogous to each other!
The sentence you quoted makes some assumptions of the reader's knowledge, namely that the reader understands "syntactic sugar" to be a process of trivial, linear transformation. The basis of the objection is not that Javascript is unlike ASM; the objection is that the relationship between Javascript and CoffeeScript is between a high-level scripting language and a trivial transformation layer of that language.
On the other hand, ASM is a low-level interface and C is a paradigmatic shift (comparatively) in programming that introduces semantics which are divorced (to an extent) from their machine implementations.
That relationship is not analogous to Javascript:CoffeeScript, as it is not nearly as significant.
The comparisons made in the GP have very little in common. The Java:Scala distinction is not similar to that of ASM:C, and neither has a similar relationship to that of HAML:Erb. So there are many objections that can be made to the analogy, especially that the analogous relationships provided are not even analogous to each other!
The sentence you quoted makes some assumptions of the reader's knowledge, namely that the reader understands "syntactic sugar" to be a process of trivial, linear transformation. The basis of the objection is not that Javascript is unlike ASM; the objection is that the relationship between Javascript and CoffeeScript is between a high-level scripting language and a trivial transformation layer of that language.
On the other hand, ASM is a low-level interface and C is a paradigmatic shift (comparatively) in programming that introduces semantics which are divorced (to an extent) from their machine implementations.
That relationship is not analogous to Javascript:CoffeeScript, as it is not nearly as significant.