There is a functional language called Elixir which runs on the Erlang virtual machine. Elixir has been designed to look like Ruby even if it's very different. That makes Ruby programmers (and maybe Python ones too) feel at ease in their first approaches with the language. When you realize how different the two languages really are you already grokked enough of Elixir to keep you going. There isn't that feeling of "oh my, I can't make it" one might have when looking at code like this http://svn.openfoundry.org/pugs/src/Pugs/Eval.hs when knowing only about C/Java/PHP/Python/Ruby
Anybody knowing Ruby or possibly Python should compare that with this https://github.com/elixir-lang/plug/blob/master/lib/plug/con...
So, my take is that if a language designer wants to create a functional language that will lure really many procedural programmers into it, s/he has to design something that looks like C or Java. PureScript is too much like Haskell (plus I hate indentation-sensitiveness, but that's almost only a subjective matter). Time will tell.
Javascript has enough implicit behavior and then some to make working with it a nightmare unless you remain extremely diligent with your coding practices. To a large extent, it's been around long enough for this to not be a major problem anymore, but is this an acceptable state of affairs for a language that dominates web programming? I'd expect most people to say "no".
There are already several JavaScript flavors for the audience you mentioned.