Two comments... or points to consider:
1- How much of my "code" is sent back to Google for their own personal use or to share with NSA and
2- How many products of Google remain in"BETA" stage, or get canceled once people start liking them?
Hot on the heels of Microsoft's latest TypeScript release, Google has shipped the first beta SDK for Dart, its own JavaScript killer alternative web language, including bug fixes, performance enhancements, and an improved editor. Like TypeScript, Dart is a language aimed at making it easier to develop large, complex web …
I may be misunderstanding you, but isn't that what JQuery* is for?
Basically, that problem has been in the 'solved' bucket these six years or more.
*(Other libraries are available. This post is not an endorsement of any product or service, although JQuery is undoubtedly awesome. Void where prohibited, etc.)
"I may be misunderstanding you, but isn't that what JQuery* is for?"
I agree for the most part, but the asker may have been wondering about maintainability also.
I'm rather wondering how Dart compares with Coffescript myself (I know a little Coffeescript, I know nothing of Dart).
I don't wholly agree with your underlying sentiment... I don't believe that any of the languages out there at the moment are perfect, and our understanding of programming language design is far from complete. That said, I rather like this quote from the author of 'javascript: the good bits':
if I could take a clean sheet of paper and write [a new language] that retains all the goodness of [JavaScript] ... I would not have come up with anything like Dart
Personally, I'd have liked a new intermediate language that would have a legitimate claim to being 'the assembly language of the web' to which ones language of choice could be compiled (see also, Parrot/PIR and dotnet/CIL). Bit of a pipedream, that one.
How about improving a language that already exists?
Well some large OS manufacturers and some flashy web design application providers joined in the standards organisation with the sole aim of ensuring that doesn’t happen.
Fortunately there is one company that, while maybe having ulterior motives, likes the idea of easy enterprise level design on the web and for the paranoid they even provide the source code so they can build their own - or spend their lives looking for the NSA backdoor in it should they so wish.
I think I might be inclined to see if I could make the dart editor as a web browser app - after all Orion allows you to edit JS in the browser and that's only a couple of steps away from a full blown IDE in the browser for the WWW.
Though the ability to develop enterprise level software on the beach may not be ideal for some...