Personally, I would want to understand JavaScript before moving on to some abstraction. The official Node.js documentation is written in JS, etc.. Then, once I am totally capable with JavaScript, there just isn’t a great incentive for me to learn another language to code on top of the same environment. I’m very happy with JavaScript. CoffeeScript has become an instant turn-off to me, and I think this sentiment is common in the community. If someone asks for help in the IRC channel, I just can’t offer a thing. And usually no one can. I’ve seen many calls-for-help that fell on deaf ears because few people are willing to learn CoffeeScript for assisting a fraction of the community. Why do I hate CoffeeScript? Because I like helping people. :( This is my personal history, and you may notice that I am totally ignorant of any benefits that CS may provide by way of being more concise, or linguistically harmonious.