Very sad. The "healing" of the IO.js fork was needless destruction. IO.js had very different aims from Node, and should have been left to its own. They wanted to expand the language with "modern", Ruby-ish ammenities, rampant transpiling and heavy build systems. All of that is completely counter to the Node/JavaScript philosophy of simple runtimes, small modules, and universal runnability. Idiomatic JavaScript has been relegated to a shadowy subculture within the NPM community.

It's as if the IO.js team couldn't conceive of a group of people who actually like debuggers and dislike build systems, so they had to ransack our package universe and install build systems everywhere, and make debugging impossible.

Now we're stuck in a position of having to wait for the IO.js superstructure to weaken and sag, at which point we'll be able to re-fork Node off of IO.js and then have the two projects and real choice back again (hopefully with a new name that's legally protected from being taken over by a usurper language). Much slower, and much waste due to Rogers' and others' desire to consolidate political power.

That all said, it might turn out quite well for the old school JavaScript community in the long run, because to do the fork, we'll have to do it properly with forkable package universes, which I suspect will be a leapfrog feature that will provide other yet-to-be-seen benefits. In that future, IO.js/ES6 could possibly be subsumed by our package system, and in having to play fair and be compared with side-by-side with JavaScript will be revealed to be the pointless syntactic sugar that it is.

Unlike the IO.js activists, such a fork wouldn't seek to delete IO.js, but it would likely languish due to collapsing under the weight if its anti-architectural, style-based, conformist ideology.

Brilliant play by the IO.js team though. They didn't care for JavaScript, so they created a new language. But then they got control of the Node brand and swapped JavaScript out for their own creation, stranding the JavaScript community in nowhere-land. Very clever. Much easier than convincing people to switch to IO.js on its own merits.