First, good news:  The Atom teams is (slowly) moving away from Coffeescript towards modern JS, and I think they&#x27;d agree (unofficially) that the choice proved to be a mistake.<p>Beyond that...<p>1. The JS world moves stupidly fast, and Coffeescript is a relic of a now-vanished age.  It was born, it evolved, and it died.  Back in those long ago days of, um, 5 year years ago, there was no ES6, and Coffeescript looked a lot more attractive.  So much so, in fact, that ES6 stole a bunch of Coffeescripts better features.<p>2. If you&#x27;re familiar with Coffeescript, it&#x27;s terse and expressive and very readable.  If you&#x27;re not, it looks like gibberish.  But that&#x27;s true of <i>any</i> language.  The proper critique of Coffeescript should be &quot;hey, not a lot of potential collaborators know it, so it&#x27;ll see unreadable <i>to them</i>&quot;, not &quot;hey, Coffeescript is generally unreadable&quot;.  JS is pretty confusing and unreadable if you don&#x27;t know it too.<p>Mind you, Atom was released 2 years ago, when Coffeescript was already starting to look dated.  And it was an open source project looking for contributors so...yeah.  Bad, bad choice.  :)