Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very easy to make plugins for. Most web developers know JavaScript, not everyone knows vimscript/viml
To be fair you can write vim plugins in python, and a fair number of people do. It's also, I'd argue, a fail from the Atom guys to make their plugins run in coffee script natively, rather than allowing people the choice of compile-to-javascript/native javascript to write plugins in (this has definitely hurt adoption for the creation of plugins that do more than trivial things or syntax highlighting). The thing about…
"Coffeescript inheritance semantics" aren't anything special in javascript. If the editor was written in javascript syntax and still chose to make use of inheritance in its design, extensions would look the same.
This works just fine, and it can't get much more javascripty:
ExtensionComponent.prototype = Object.create(Component.prototype);
function ExtensionComponent() {
Component.call(this);
}
ExtensionComponent.prototype.doSomething = function () {
// ...
};