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There is no shortage of compile-to-JS languages. For a non-comprehensive list, see

https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...

For many of the offerings in the list, the problem, IMHO, is the lack of a complete story.

If you base it on an existing language - in this case, Python - you would expect a full implementation of the language, or at least a good portion of the core language features. The benefits of an existing language are often familiarity and the potential to reuse existing code. With partial implementation, you can hardly gain these. And the downside of extra abstraction quickly outweighs any superficial perception of familiarity.

If you create a new language, you have to strike a good balance between language features and interoperability. You need to bring enough new things to the table to make it worthwhile to learn, adopt and support it, and yet you can't overstate the importance of a good interoperability story unless you can afford to completely ignore the JavaScript ecosystem. See DART.



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