Without agreeing or disagreeing with your conclusion, I'm not sure I understand what you're reaching for with the opening sentence: If you can't be bothered to learn the behavior of keywords as fundamental to JavaScript as "var" and "this," then yes, you'd better be using some wrapper.
That seems to be trivially true, but in context it only makes sense if you're implying a bi-conditional, namely that the only reason to use a wrapper is if you don't understand var and this.
I believe that to be false. There are many reasons to use syntactic or semantic sugar even when you understand the underlying language very well. As a demonstration of this, I give you that most tools of this type are written by people who understand the underlying languages incredibly well and design such tools for their own use as relative expert users.
Oh, I just meant that those (confusion with `this` and `var`) were pretty silly things to point to in praise of CoffeeScript, as they are so easy to understand and fundamental to JavaScript. Like you said, CoffeeScript is aimed at a broader audience than those who can't grasp JS basics.
The problem is not confusion about them, or inability to figure them out, per se. Dealing with syntactic awkwardness and features full of tricky corner cases takes mental effort even if you can understand them perfectly. Coffeescript let you (to a greater extend than JavaScript) write and read just the code you mean, without having to think explicitly about these questions every time. You still have to understand JavaScript in a fairly deep way to build solid CoffeeScript programs.
That seems to be trivially true, but in context it only makes sense if you're implying a bi-conditional, namely that the only reason to use a wrapper is if you don't understand var and this.
I believe that to be false. There are many reasons to use syntactic or semantic sugar even when you understand the underlying language very well. As a demonstration of this, I give you that most tools of this type are written by people who understand the underlying languages incredibly well and design such tools for their own use as relative expert users.