I was speaking with a colleague about Node and he suggested using Coffeescript instead of JS directly for the exact reasons you mentioned.
I'm also coming from Obj-C, C and Ruby background and recently read "Javascript: The Good Parts". I'm still looking for the good parts promised in the title and introduction.
I agree; it's a shortcut for people who know JS, not for people who are learning it for the first time. As soon as you need to use or look into the internals of a library that isn't written in CoffeeScript, everything's going to get unstuck pretty quickly.
I personally happen to disagree. (I have production/team experience with both node.js and CoffeeScript.)
For many learning types, I'd guess it's preferable to leisurely learn JavaScript from the shores of CoffeeScript. Rather than having to deal with all of JavaScript's absurdity at once.
And when you need to read someone else's JavaScript code, you can usually get away with ignoring boilerplate.
I'm also coming from Obj-C, C and Ruby background and recently read "Javascript: The Good Parts". I'm still looking for the good parts promised in the title and introduction.