I wonder if anyone's tried to write a language primarily for manipulating the DOM that's less... "quirky" than JavaScript? With WebAssembly being fairly well supported these days I suppose someone with a background in language design could write an interpreter in C for such a domain-specific language and target WASM.

Of course, people would say "what's the point" when JS is a thing and widely supported. I wonder if there'd be a) a compelling improvement in performance and b) a compelling improvement in reliability if we just wholesale replaced it based on lessons learned? I reckon even just keeping JS and eliminating implicit coercions would be a huge improvement (as well as maybe automatic semicolon insertion) and reduce the debugging times considerably.