> Ruby programmers would stop trying to avoid writing JavaScript by writing their own JS-based implementation of Ruby
I would appreciate it if people knowing very little about programming languages stopped commenting on new languages. Nearly every comment here is either baseless or irrelevant or simply wrong. It's frustrating.
In your specific case: CoffeeScript and this are most certainly not a "JS-based implementations of Ruby." This is: http://opalrb.org/
And how the language "looks" - its syntax - does matter, but not in the way most people think it matters. It's just that the syntactically simpler constructs tend to be used more often, so the choice of syntax affects the code people write. The rest, including "readability" or simply "beauty", is meaningless in the long run.
That's why I said "their own" JS-based implementation.
And the point is that it goes out of its way to re-invent features already supported by ES6 just so they look more like Ruby. Like using string interpolation instead of template strings, for example.
It's not a language built on top of JS to improve upon JS, it's just as contrived as CoffeeScript (which unlike this one actually had a reason to exist in that it influenced the development of ES6 when a lot of features it implemented weren't yet part of JS).
What is the benefit of learning this language? Who is this for? JS programmers? No, they could just use Babel to write something that will eventually become vanilla JS.
Does it bring anything new to the table like ClojureScript or LiveScript does? No, it's basically CoffeeScript with ES6 scoping rules and JSX elements.
So in the end all it adds is another barrier to entry for new developers joining your project/company with the only benefit being that it's "prettier".
I'm not saying bad ideas aren't worth exploring -- they are, and if your bad idea happens to involve creating your own programming language, all the more power to you. But the only "good" reason to use this language is if you want your JS to look like Ruby.
Just like Haml is for people who want their HTML to look like Ruby; and like Sass (not SCSS, I mean the original braceless syntax) is for people who want their CSS to look like Ruby.
I would appreciate it if people knowing very little about programming languages stopped commenting on new languages. Nearly every comment here is either baseless or irrelevant or simply wrong. It's frustrating.
In your specific case: CoffeeScript and this are most certainly not a "JS-based implementations of Ruby." This is: http://opalrb.org/
And how the language "looks" - its syntax - does matter, but not in the way most people think it matters. It's just that the syntactically simpler constructs tend to be used more often, so the choice of syntax affects the code people write. The rest, including "readability" or simply "beauty", is meaningless in the long run.
EDIT: I'm in no way involved in this project!