Hell, yeah.

I've been writing with Coffeescript, HAML, and Stylus for about a year now, and I'm not looking back. Most IE-specific errors these days are parser errors rather than semantic errors, so JS-Lint takes care of that. And you can't use Coffeescript without knowing Javascript, you just can't; too many libraries are written in JS for you to be unable to read them. And Coffeescript has a node.js mode that rocks.

SEO abuse is certainly one of them.

Google has been clamping down on low-quality aggregation sites, as we all know. One way to avoid looking like a low-quality aggregation site is to (a) create a vast farm of low-quality aggregation sites, (b) harvest high-quality articles from other sites, (c) run those articles through Google translate, (d) repost them to your farm. Because they don't look like the originals (being translations) they get around Google's "recognize repeat content" filters. Google uptakes them as original content.

Delicious has been filled with links to these in recent weeks, mostly because Delicious once had a decently high reputation as a site of quality linkage, and lots of people had trust in it.