Would a coffeescript-like language that generates php be something of interest to people? Improving the syntax whilst maintaining the ability to just drop onto an apache server.
It would be really cool. In fact, I was thinking about that right now.
Just convert and bingo, instantly deployable on 100% of php hosts. For local development, a script with --watch a la sass, or maybe a single index.php for converting things on the fly...
Yes, that would be something huge (or maybe I'm thinking that because I have this idea for a long time and really wish someone would do this).
Obviously, the quality of the output php code would matter a lot. Actually, by quality I mean mostly the performance.
I've started something like that a year ago. It's called purplescript( https://github.com/martinrusev/purplescript ) and it's a ruby like language written in Python ( with PLY ) and it compiles directly to PHP, so there is no need to rewrite PHP functions - they just work.
Probably to some people, sure. For totally 100% from scratch projects, it might be nice - may be harder to deal with existing code bases that you want to extend or integrate with, no?
