You go back and forth between saying that "you don't get it because you don't get it" and "this is my preference, but you do have a point."

I am experienced in JavaScript, and I believe you that I could train myself to code in CoffeeScript or even brainfuck, but should I want to? I am a big fan of the native JavaScript syntax with a few exceptions. I believe it can be improved, but I don't believe CoffeeScript fixes more than it breaks.

A more appropriate metaphor is a non-Spanish speaker complaining that you dubbed my English movie with more English spoken by a Spanish man with a really heavy Spanish accent. I can still understand the movie if I try but it certainly doesn't improve the experience. Perhaps it does for Spanish people?

I don't like languages that let you do what you think is obvious, and when I look at 5 different examples of the exact same code they all look completely different because it turns out that there's no agreement between what people think is obvious (big problem with Ruby). That's my personal preference.

Using browser-compatibility examples is unfair. I'm not arguing against precompiling with an improved syntax, I'm arguing against precompiling against this specific syntax. It's not hard to imagine a syntax where hanging commas are automagically fixed (even Google Closure does this for you). Inserting whole lines to reorder the list works perfectly fine if you have hanging commas.

  var foo = [
    1,
    2,
    3,
  ]

Re: self, no harm done if your variables are scoped, as they always should be. For bonus irony, var self = this; in the root scope is eqv to what it would be anyways.