[davidw]

Just as a data point, most "on top of" languages seem a bit more distant from what they sit on top of.

In other words, C is somewhat cross platform, and much higher level than assembler. Ruby does way more out of the box than C does.

Coffeescript seems to mostly just be a modified JavaScript syntax, although I have to admit I haven't looked at it that closely.

[SoftwareMaven]

That's all C++ originally was, too. Everything has to start somewhere, and fixing some of JavaScript's warts is as good a place to start as anywhere.