This is terrible. I was so happy CoffeeScript died a quiet death. Now someone thinks of this.
Keep it simple. Code should be easy to read. Also, ain't nobody got time to learn yet another obscure abstraction that will add only a marginal productivity gain at best (and probably sacrifice readability + add another build step + add another learning curve to new devs in the process).
I'm not convinced this is a good idea either, but abstractions and syntax are what makes people love or hate a language. I enjoy writing python over JS because of ergonomics. Its not really about productivity, its about being happy when writing and reading code.
That being said, stapling on a compile step maybe isn't the answer.
CoffeeScript immediately revolted me and Civet is giving me the same heebie jeebies. It's the kind of punctuation-as-code that the world rejected 10+ years ago when Perl faded away. Verbose code is better for readability and readability is 100X more valuable that faster typing. It's not more expressive, it's more obscure.
Keep it simple. Code should be easy to read. Also, ain't nobody got time to learn yet another obscure abstraction that will add only a marginal productivity gain at best (and probably sacrifice readability + add another build step + add another learning curve to new devs in the process).