Please don't perpetuate the else silliness of the (intentionally bad) first example there. Stick a return in front of the log calls, lose the else, and unindent all following.
Yes, that is of course preferable. There are much better error handling strategies than what the example gave.
I was only commenting on the readability aspect, all other things being equal.
Use '=>' instead of '->' to automatically bind 'this'.
I absolutely disagree. Brackets are a big part of the reason the JS version is more readable than the CoffeeScript version, IMO. I don't understand why anyone would think readability would increase with syntactical ambiguity. This isn't even the traditional braces-vs-indentation argument either; I much prefer Python's syntax to CoffeeScript's, and I use both regularly.
(Of course, as it is for all stylistic considerations, it's a matter of taste, not absolutes.)