> JS of the era was a pain to use; CoffeeScript made writing and reading things much easier
It didn't. Anything you learn / are familiar with will be easier to write - Coffescript was easier to write for people who learned Coffescript. Which in hindsight wasn't time well spent as they would've eventually had to bite the bullet anyway & just learn JavaScript like everyone else.
JavaScript is much much easier to write and read for a person who has chosen to learn JavaScript & has not had the occasion to learn Coffescript (i.e. most people) so you were also doing others a disservice if readability was one of your goals.
> which is the reason it took off
The reason it took off was the Ruby was going through a popularity trend & Rails devs wanted to work in a front-end language that felt syntactically familiar. It was purely aesthetic.
Around 2012, I had sunk several years into becoming extremely familiar with JavaScript when I switched onto a team which was using CoffeeScript. I immediately liked it: it addressed some of the things I'd always found irritating about JavaScript, and I found it very easy to pick up. I was not a Ruby or even Python user at that time, so that didn't influence my decision either.
But you're right that you did have to know enough JS to understand what CoffeeScript was doing under the hood when things went wrong.
It didn't. Anything you learn / are familiar with will be easier to write - Coffescript was easier to write for people who learned Coffescript. Which in hindsight wasn't time well spent as they would've eventually had to bite the bullet anyway & just learn JavaScript like everyone else.
JavaScript is much much easier to write and read for a person who has chosen to learn JavaScript & has not had the occasion to learn Coffescript (i.e. most people) so you were also doing others a disservice if readability was one of your goals.
> which is the reason it took off
The reason it took off was the Ruby was going through a popularity trend & Rails devs wanted to work in a front-end language that felt syntactically familiar. It was purely aesthetic.