Give me a break, you know what I mean. When you look at the page source, do you see embedded coffeescript? Can you debug in coffeescript with the standard tools?

I know these things aren't possible and shouldn't be expected b/c coffee is a "compiled" language...but you can do them in javascript, and telling the vanilla js programmer that they're "exactly the same" is being less than honest.

For "vanilla js programmer", coffee-to-js-correspondance probably doesn't matter anyway. But the point of coffee is that compiler output is very straightforward. While I have to admit that tooling is far from good enough at present, I personally have no problem reading any js generated by coffee, even without source available to me. Apparently many[citation needed] coffee users can do this.

What really made the "vanilla js programmer" feel uncomfortable, I speculate, is the correct way of handling javascript oddities, such as handling nulls (`?` in coffee). They are daunting -- but ignorance is no excuse. Once you start to populate these patterns yourself in your javascript, not only would you immediately recognize them in coffee-generated js, but also you'd appreciate that coffee abstracted them.

I think these common points against coffee mostly apply to other compile-to-js languages such as clojure-script, where the generated code almost always made no sense to a "vanilla js programmer".

chrome/ff dev tools have source maps support, I can work directly with coffee source the same way, as I work with less source instead of compiled css ... only coffeeconsole is in a separate tab via chrome extension

sure, using source maps in chrome dev tools, I can work directly with coffee source, the same way I work with less source instead of compiled css

He's probably referring to debugging etc.