[bcherry]

I kinda agree - Coffeescript in particular seems like putting extra weight/overhead into the process for very little other than cosmetic gains over JavaScript. Whatever problems JS may have - I don't really feel that CoffeeScript addresses them. It addresses the fake problems (IMO).

TypeScript and related make a lot of sense for very large projects/teams because static type checking can be VERY useful, and the lack of a statically typed language choice for in-browser programming is a large weakness of the web ecosystem. So TypeScript is a tremendous advantage to have in the toolkit, and a much saner approach than older heavy-weight options like GWT.

[the_rosentotter]

GWT still has a major advantage in that you write the server in the same language as the client (Java). Indeed they are the same code base and can share code, classes, etc. I have yet to see an alternative with such a strong server side component to it.