Asm/C and Java/scala are unfair comparisons, since they're totally different languages with different structures and idioms.
I just started using CoffeeScript for a project of mine and while it did clean up the messy look of the Javascript, it doesn't improve much upon Javascript feature-wise. I felt like I was still writing Javascript, it just looked a little better.
I've been writing CoffeScript daily for about 4 weeks now. On the first day, it seemed pretty minor. About three days in I was a believer. Now, when I write the occasional few lines of Javascript in my browser's console, it just feels so arduous to type. Whenever I pop open a Javascript library to read it, I feel like there is an assault on my eyes. I'm never going back.
It looks a LOT better, it requires a LOT less typing, and it saves you a LOT of stupid syntax errors and typos compared to brace-semicolon-comma-parentheses stew.
This is the only comparison on your list that is remotely appropriate. In no meaningful way is it true that
CoffeeScript:Javascript :: C:Assembler
Javascript is not a low-level language resembling a primitive machine interface, and CoffeeScript mostly provides syntactic sugar, not new semantics or a different paradigm.
Javascript is not a low-level language resembling a primitive machine interface, and CoffeeScript mostly provides syntactic sugar, not new semantics or a different paradigm.
In order for A:B :: C:D it is not the case that A and C need to be similar, nor B and D.
The comparisons made in the GP have very little in common. The Java:Scala distinction is not similar to that of ASM:C, and neither has a similar relationship to that of HAML:Erb. So there are many objections that can be made to the analogy, especially that the analogous relationships provided are not even analogous to each other!
The sentence you quoted makes some assumptions of the reader's knowledge, namely that the reader understands "syntactic sugar" to be a process of trivial, linear transformation. The basis of the objection is not that Javascript is unlike ASM; the objection is that the relationship between Javascript and CoffeeScript is between a high-level scripting language and a trivial transformation layer of that language.
On the other hand, ASM is a low-level interface and C is a paradigmatic shift (comparatively) in programming that introduces semantics which are divorced (to an extent) from their machine implementations.
That relationship is not analogous to Javascript:CoffeeScript, as it is not nearly as significant.
Java and Scala.
Erb and Haml.
CSS and Less/Sass.
Edit: Walking and driving.