It was more a "plus ca change" thought, I actually liked the idea of CoffeeScript, although for my personal work I came to the conclusion that it's not that necessary.

Ratfor itself was mostly a stop-gap solution. Fortran 77 made things a bit easier, and a quite a few developers migrated to C.

I'm actually surprised that there aren't more preprocessors like CoffeeScript. Yes, there are a few languages that compile to JavaScript, but most of them don't aim for ease of integration of existing libraries. So it's just you, your language and the DOM. And if it's just there to supplement your usual backend language (Lisp, Java etc.), you probably don't care that much about node.js.