I feel like coffeescript largely exists because of early mistakes in javascript, like no heredoc and places where they weakened the language to make it more convenient, like this one I just discovered today (with workarounds) http://stackoverflow.com/a/14510952/539149 and js has a ton of problems because it separated Array and Object, but overall I think it's still probably my favorite language right now. I like lua too but it's less pure, so aspects of it remind me of older languages like pascal.