I followed the link hoping to learn a little more about CoffeeScript and node.js, and I suppose I did. It seems that, in essence, it lets you write dynamic (server- and client- side) html with something that looks a lot like python.
The prospect of debugging at several removes still troubles me.
The thing about CoffeeScript is that, even though it's a lot more readable than JavaScript, the mapping between the two languages is close enough that reading compiled CoffeeScript as easy as reading well-written JavaScript and it's pretty easy to see the CoffeeScript that generated it most of the time.
(This is still admittedly very suboptimal. It's just not as horrifying as you might be thinking.)
