[edemaine]

One of the Civet devs here. To me, the main benefit of Civet is the ability to rapidly add useful features to the language, while preserving all the benefits of TS (tooling, etc.). We're constantly coming up with ideas — from TC39 proposals, other languages, or general brainstorming — and implementing them quickly. For example, we recently added pattern matching when catching exceptions, which took just a couple of hours of development; or Python-style from ... import ... for better autocompletion of imports. All of these features are optional; you can write well-formed TypeScript as usual, and just choose to use the features you think are worth the learning curve for readers. The plugins for VSCode, Vite, esbuild, Webpack, eslint, etc. aren't perfect, but they let Civet code enjoy most of the tooling out there.

I personally use Civet for all my coding projects, as I'm devoted to it continuing to flourish. But if you ever don't like what Civet is offering you, you can eject at any time by replacing your code with the TypeScript compilation, which we make as close as we can to your input.

What happens if a TC39 proposal is rejected? That's actually the good case for us, because it means we can keep the feature as is. Civet already transpiles all features to TypeScript, so they can live here forever if we think they're good. The trickier part is when Java/TypeScript changes in a way that's incompatible with Civet. Then we plan to change Civet to match Java/TypeScript, so that we don't diverge (though compiler flags allow us to also support the older form with explicit opt-in if we think it's worth doing so).

JavaScript and TypeScript move slow. Largely that's a good thing; they're a stable foundation, and we don't want to mess them up. But it's also exciting to be on the bleeding edge, explore new ideas, and obtain new features as quickly as we can design them, instead of waiting a decade. Many features are also too niche / add to much complexity for the general JavaScript language, but they're still fair game for languages that transpile to JavaScript. See also the recent JS0 vs. JSSugar discussion.

[lifthrasiir]

I think you need to drop or at least weaken an inspiration from CoffeeScript if that's a goal, otherwise everyone will immediately draw a connection to that and overlook any other aspect of Civet. (I personally hate CoffeeScript especially for its indentation and that contributed to my initial reaction.) You can't solve this problem with simply supporting two radically different coding styles---the front page seems to prefer one over another anyway.

[scotty79]

I love getting rid of visual noise of brackets around code blocks. It's as silly debate as tabs vs spaces. It should be a text editor setting if you prefer to see them or hide and see just indents instead.

[zellyn]

It's fun and valuable to have a place to land proposals and try them out early (seems like TS itself should have flags for this though). The problem is that as the proposal is refined, or if it is rejected, it implies constant changes to your language, which will basically drive away anyone who's not experimenting around for fun in the same mindset as you. Could be good or bad, although managing the flux might be tricky even so.

The addition of quick things you whipped up in a couple of hours seems like it'll make the rate of changes impossible to handle. It's unlikely almost by definition that the change you whipped up quickly will stand the test of repeated use and further experience unmodified.

All that said, it's a super fun thing to do, and hats off for such an ambitious project. If nothing else, writing a parser, transpiler, etc. is impressive and fun work, and will undoubtedly enable/force you to learn all the javascript/TS quirks and details extremely well! :-)

[hosh]

Coming from Ruby and Elixir, Civet adds a lot of things I miss from those languages.

I still have gripes about runtimes such as Nodejs, but I don't expect something like Civet to solve those.