[olavk]

JavaScript is pretty limited. It lacks features like packages, classes and so on. Brendan Eich, the inventer of JavaScript, have stated that the language was frozen prematurely due to political rather than technical reasons.

Luckily core JavaScript is also pretty flexible, which is what allows you to implement your own class system, package system and so on, on top of vanilla JavaScript. And this is basically what language abstractions like GWT, Cappuchino, Pajamas and so on does. They are basically a set op macros on top of JavaScript.

I just think they throw out the baby with the bathwater by implementing a different language on top of JavaScript rather than just extend and improve existing JavaScript in a backwardly compatible manner. This forces the language abstrations to create their own set of libraries, which will never be as good as the native JavaScript libraries. You get caught in a ghetto, and isolate yourself from the broader JS communkty.

My own approach is to embrace and extend JavaScript in a bachwardly compatible manner, such that you can still use the large amount of native JavaScript libraries. Ideally "language abstraction" should be orthogonal to library abstraction. I want a more powerful JavaScript, but I also want to keep using JQuery.