I think his point — and I tend to agree with it, accurate or not — was that there is an inherent distrust that comes with a project "sponsored" by a large black box (in this case, Google). Google doesn't exactly have a great track record of supporting things forever, or even keeping their "open source" systems as open as possible[1].

So, people are naturally suspicious. CoffeeScript doesn't have this vibe, to me at least. It's made by a team of people across companies (although I think it is sponsored partially by The New York Times Company?) and there is a lot of community which lives outside a specific company's ecosystem.

That said, it could just be my own personal bias, having used coffee script extensively and not used Dart much at all.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/11/google-just-pulled-a-...