I've looked into CoffeeScript, and while I really like the sentiment—routing around JavaScript's warts—I fundamentally disagree with the technique employed to achieve the goal.<p>What the world needs is <i>less</i> syntax, not more. Perl, Ruby, and Haskell—the inspirations for CoffeeScript, as near as I can tell—are, as a recently-linked entry called Perl, programming languages that you have to constantly use to keep your programming skills.<p>For all its problems, as long as you can remember to use === and friends instead of ==, JavaScript's syntax is relatively obvious, if unweildly, to anyone who grew up in a C dominated world.<p>Fargo, the recently-linked Scheme in JavaScript, is something I an get behind personally, though sadly Clojure is becoming the default Lisp my mind thinks in.<p>We need to declare a moratorium on new syntax. With Lisp, C, Python, and a couple other languages (maybe), we have all the syntax we need. Novelty is not innovation. New is not better.<p>We live in a world where utility players, i.e. everyone in a startup, already have to think in terms of too many different languages.