Taking this argument to its logical conclusion, Perl would be the ultimate language for 'professionals' to use, since it's full of shorthand symbols. And it's true -- if you wrote the code, Perl is very easy to scan. If you didn't write the code, however, Perl is not always so easy to scan.
Which is exactly the point of Ruby, Python, Coffeescript, and other similar languages. I´ve heard it said that on average, only 20% of programming is writing original code, and the rest is maintaining other people's code. For this reason, Ruby, Python, and Coffeescript are much easier to maintain for most people than JS, C, Perl, PHP, etc.
Personally, I know both JS and Coffeescript well, and have actually done much more work in JS over the years, but the first thing I do now when I get a third-party Javascript program is convert it to Coffeescript (using js2coffee). I can read and understand Coffeescript about twice as fast as I can Javascript, even though I started working with Javascript in 1998.
Which is exactly the point of Ruby, Python, Coffeescript, and other similar languages. I´ve heard it said that on average, only 20% of programming is writing original code, and the rest is maintaining other people's code. For this reason, Ruby, Python, and Coffeescript are much easier to maintain for most people than JS, C, Perl, PHP, etc.
Personally, I know both JS and Coffeescript well, and have actually done much more work in JS over the years, but the first thing I do now when I get a third-party Javascript program is convert it to Coffeescript (using js2coffee). I can read and understand Coffeescript about twice as fast as I can Javascript, even though I started working with Javascript in 1998.