[randomdata]

The same could be said of any language you are unfamiliar with. Ignoring the inheritance, which should be familiar to anyone with class-based OO experience, that code basically translates to:

    function ItemView() {
      this.render = function() {
        this.options.items.each(this.renderItem.bind(this));
      }

      this.renderItem = function(item) {
        this.el.append(item.get("title"))
      }
    }

In this example, I don't see any significant difference as far as readability goes, to be honest. I will note, in case it is not entirely clear, that the use of Backbone in the example is unrelated to CoffeeScript.

[mgutz]

Except you left out setting the prototype chain to extend from the super class. CoffeeScript expresses it succinctly. The example above, while readable, already has much more noise than signal.