[simi_]

> But meeting the needs of customers is what I get paid to do

That was like being slapped with a good dose of pragmatism – I love it!

Wrt the later part of your post, try Dart. It's annoying in entirely new ways, but it does away with a lot of JS pains; it's also mature, powerful, and production-oriented. It even comes with a VM to run it in, so you can pretend it's a real –boy– language. Its obscurity also means that it can be hard to come across help/tools (emacs completion, anyone?), but despite all the shortcomings I enjoy using it, and am happy to back Google's bet on Dart.

[bphogan]

Thanks for the recommendation. I'm currently annoying myself by learning Elm. :)