Sep 12, 2011 By Reuven Lerner
Why would you want to compile a program into JavaScript? First, because modern JavaScript engines are quite speedy. Compiling to JavaScript ensures that the execution will be fast, and that it will work on a wide variety of platforms and in many contexts—similar in many ways to the growing number of languages (for example, Clojure and Scala) that compile to JVM bytecodes. Second, if you can compile into JavaScript, you can take advantage of the libraries and frameworks that already work with JavaScript.
The other reason to use a language other than JavaScript, but that compiles into JavaScript, is that you can use a syntax that's more accessible and less prone to errors. I'm a longtime user of both Ruby and Python, and I found that CoffeeScript incorporated many of my favorite features from both languages to create a language with easy-to-understand syntax and powerful features. If you know Ruby, Python and JavaScript, you'll likely be able to learn this language in a relatively short time period.
