CoffeeScript sure does have some problems of its own, but it was designed to be compilable to JavaScript.
And of course developers are not going affected by the flaws mentioned in the snippets, but they're present and not nice. Would you like to work on a desk that's always messy?
Agree. CoffeeScript has great syntax that I find very inspiring and might incorporate into my own language someday, but all in all, javascript is not that bad... at least not the parts that CoffeeScript can fix.
The real problem that CoffeeScript solves is developer stubbornness.
Some developers decided a long time ago that JavaScript is terrible and so CoffeeScript gave them a way to program in JavaScript without changing their minds about how terrible JavaScript is.
The reality is that it would have been easier if developers weren't so stubborn to begin with.
I have nothing against CoffeeScript, and I've used it on a few things, but in general I find JS to be an enjoyable language to work in. If I had more issues with the syntax or something, I might find the switch to CoffeeScript worthwhile.
The biggest problem with CoffeeScript for me is that it's very much not typo-safe. Most typos lead to syntactically correct programs that blow up in unrelated parts of code.
Coffeescript does have useful features, but problems such as the ones I described made CoffeeScript code inconvenient to maintain in practice.
If we weigh the convenient aspects of CoffeeScript against the inconvenient aspects, in the end, CoffeeScript can be an inconvenient language to use. It was the case at least for me in various projects I had to maintain.
Part of the inconvenience was all the JavaScript tooling you cannot use, and occassionally being forced to read JavaScript code generated by CoffeeScript.
CoffeeScript still suffers from many of the same problems that JavaScript does, as it's basically a very thin syntactic veneer over JavaScript.
Like CoffeeScript's homepage current states, 'The golden rule of CoffeeScript is: "It's just JavaScript".'
The problems with JavaScript are very inherent and at its very core. They aren't the kind of things that are fixed by changing the syntax. While languages like Dart and TypeScript go far beyond where CoffeeScript does, the mere presence of JavaScript underneath still causes problems and forces in limitations.
If anything, coffeescript is the status quo. People just assume it's the hip thing to do; that if you're using JS it's because you simply haven't bothered evaluating coffeescript.
Most of these issues could be said about Python as well, but the environment that you describe is of a very poor code quality culture. This can happen in any language. I'm not saying we should use CoffeeScript in 2019, but that the criticisms seem vague.
JS has gotchas and some really bad parts, but if you know the language well and know what you're doing, I think it's quite pleasant actually for many problems. Have you done much programming with JS, and if so, what was so unpleasant about it?
Though, I think I've heard pretty much all the complaints against JavaScript, many of which are addressed by using something like CoffeeScript.
That's kind of the point of the article: If it's easy to get it wrong in CoffeeScript, i.e. CoffeeScript has its own bad parts, then you're better off just learning to deal with the bad parts in JavaScript directly.
And of course developers are not going affected by the flaws mentioned in the snippets, but they're present and not nice. Would you like to work on a desk that's always messy?
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