Haskell wasn't simply sugaring the regular C design patterns. The C that the compiler generated was nothing like the C that you would normally write.

A better example would be Objective C compiling to C. And I would agree that early Objective C wasn't really a language that added new paradigms to C. It sugared good coding practices for the most part, and did little else. As a result, I generally recommended a combination of the K&R book and the ObjC language spec to learn it -- buying books for ObjC was a waste of time, since it was such a thin wrapper around C.

Coffeescript is in a similar position.

Clearly my writing is obtuse. Haskell has a language features—lazy evaluation for example—with no equivalent in C. Nothing about lazy evaluation compiles more-or-less 1:1 into C code, it’s a program-wide transformation.

CoffeeScript’s features are all JavaScript features, it’s a simple translation from some shorthand into some other shorthand. CoffeeScript is like the LET macro in ur-Scheme. Powerful, handy, but not a new paradigm, more like some syntactic meta-programming on top of JavaScript’s existing model of programs.

    > CoffeeScript’s features are all JavaScript features, 
    > it’s a simple translation from some shorthand into 
    > some other shorthand.

This isn't entirely accurate -- in the sense that current CoffeeScript semantics can't be implemented as a series of "find-and-replace" operations into JavaScript. Some of the areas in which the AST transformations become more involved are:

* Converting arbitrary statements into expressions.

* Destructuring assignment, when mixed with splats and soaks.

* Chains of soaked invocations, like:

      value = one?().two?().three?()

* Class bodies as blocks of executable code.

So there are more advanced macros that are being used. It's not doing much a lisp couldn't do. I mean, look at scribble. It's still racket, even though it has not an s-exp in sight.

Chains of soaked invocations are just a Maybe Monad anyways. It's nothing too out there. You could write them in normal javascript fine.

Coffeescript doesn't even have its own standard library, much less a runtime being cross-compiled with its own garbage collector and stack frame constructs.