On Saturday, 22 March 2014 at 12:36:17 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
I am not convinced. CoffeeScript as a JavaScript dialect hasn't really taken off, people just use JavaScript.
Well, I don't know, Dart is in the same vein as CoffeeScript. Dart is compiling to Javascript and Angular Dart is gaining quite a bit of interest even before being ready for production. AngularJS is already quite popular, and more messy than the Dart version. There is a clear upgrade path from JS->Dart. Dart VM will most likely be integrated in Chrome by the end of the year and that probably will have an effect on adoption rate. But, the Dart semantics are significantly better than ECMAScript/Javascript. Probably more so than CoffeeScript.
cfront also used to compile to C, but the C++ semantics are more suitable for OO than C. So it supports a different workflow. (but cfront as I remember it was nowhere near great)
So, in one aspect I agree, if the dialect is just syntax, then it has less chance of gaining momentum, but if it better supports a particular workflow/ type of modelling then it might succeed.
I think a python-like syntax in combination with an interpreter like environment (in the vain of ipython) could be more suitable for a particular workflow than the c-like syntax. A strongly typed, terse and readable language with a good dev environment could be a real killer.
Prototype in the REPL/interpreter and paste into your editor is an attractive development proposition.
