[davidbanham]

I would recommend against using any CoffeeScript before you're proficient with JavaScript. It can be a great boon to productivity, but if you don't understand what it's doing underneath you'll shoot yourself in the foot a lot.

[tlrobinson]

I like CoffeeScript but I agree with this.

Also, yes, plenty of people outside of the Rails community use CoffeeScript (I'm one of them)