I've spent a good part of the last year writing a great deal of JS (CoffeeScript, to be exact) after a few years away and it's become a lot of fun. Node/NPM have given JavaScript some semblance of tooling, and (modern) browsers do a much better job of implementing standards. However, I'm getting fed up with CoffeeScript. First and foremost, I would like to say I have tremendous respect for Jeremy Ashkenas and the other CoffeeScript contributors. It has advanced the community miles and has been very pleasurable to use. However, CoffeeScript has grown as a library, not as a language.
Gibraltar should be a language. It should have a clean, simple design without redundancy or sharp edges. As the design evolves over time, the process should be documented (a la PEPs in the Python community), transparent, and open. Above all, the language should be stable. I view CoffeeScript (and other similar languages) as studies whose findings we can combine into a new, better design