[yuchi]

There's already a production ready transpiler, and a big bunch of production code to test against every new transpiler. Why do you think this is going to be a reason for fragmentation?

And, by the way, coffeescript is not intended to be a language for hackers (I mean, only for hackers) but for Ruby programmers moving to javascript, JS programmers looking for a more terse syntax and programmers with an eye for terseness.

In my opinion it has only two big flaws that need to be targeted by new transpilers: 1) for --> each 2) parens free chainable syntax.

[mistercow]

Well, one reason that it could go that way is that the attitude that the maintainers has had toward feature-creep is "just make your own fork!" That's why we now have more dialects than we can shake a stick at, but it has kept the main branch from becoming PHP.

[charliesome]

Please stop saying 'transpiler'. The CoffeeScript compiler is no less deserving of the term than any other compiler.

[mistercow]

"Transpiler" is a subset of "compiler", so it can hardly be a demeaning term. A transpiler is simply a compiler that translates code from language A to language B where A and B have roughly the same abstraction level. It is true that CoffeeScript is slightly more abstract than JavaScript in a few features (although JavaScript's inheritance model is more abstract than CoffeeScript's classes, for example), but any difference in abstraction level is tiny compared to the difference between, say, C and assembly.

[yuchi]

Exactly what I wanted to reply.