[tosh]

I also was hoping for syntax more similar to python (my background mainly is in python & ruby and I wrote my fair share of coffeescript).

That said, in the day to day syntax (while important) is just a part of the equation. The main thing is that it does not get in your way (I struggled with JavaScript objects getting silently reduced to the first attribute in coffeescript because of syntax errors on my side).

When evaluating a platform I look at syntax (the first thing you see) but then I try to look under the cover to see the whole.

    * What are the basic building blocks of the language
    * How is the standard lib
    * How is the 3rd party lib story (dependency mgmt, modularity, package mgmt, …)
    * How is tooling support
    * How is performance
    * How is working together with others
    * How is reading code I've written months ago
    * …

In my book Dart looks pretty attractive once you take a closer look: https://www.dartlang.org/articles/idiomatic-dart/