Through a bizarre twist of history, the entire client-side web runs on a language that was thrown together in 10 days.

Despite huge investments in their own proprietary technology by the likes of Sun Microsystems, Adobe and Microsoft, this weird little spinoff of self and scheme is everywhere, while client-side Java, ActiveX and Flash fade into obscurity.

Unsurprisingly for a language developed so quickly, Javascript is pretty ugly. I'm fond of saying that it's a horrible language, with a really nice language inside trying to get out. It gets some things, like scoping rules, very, very wrong. But it got other things, like anonymous functions, exactly right, long before they were adopted in Java, C#, or C++. Even Python, my favourite language ever, doesn't get them quite right.

Several people have attempted to build a nicer syntax on top of the javascript virtual machine. In fact, the list of languages that compile to JS is startlingly big.

For the last couple of years I've been using CoffeeScript as my standard javascript syntax.

From the project page:

"CoffeeScript is a little language that compiles into JavaScript. Underneath that awkward Java-esque patina, JavaScript has always had a gorgeous heart. CoffeeScript is an attempt to expose the good parts of JavaScript in a simple way."

and I think it achieves this admirably. It doesn't solve all of javascript's problems - you can still get into trouble with the Infamous Loop Problem, but it does make the language considerably more succinct, mostly by stealing ideas from Python and Haskell.

function d(x){
    return 2*x
}

d = (x) -> 2*x

math =
    root:   Math.sqrt
    square: square
    cube:   (x) -> x * square x

values=(option.value for option in question.options)