I find JS a thoroughly unpleasant language to work with. When will we reach the point where JS could be abstracted away entirely? (Just like how I never need to interact with assembly language any more.)
1. JS as an assembly language. This is what emscripten[0], a LLVM bytecode-to-JS does, by following the asm.js specification[1]. This is for CPU-intensive tasks, not DOM manipulation. You can use any language that has a LLVM frontend.
2. JS as a target language, from a specific, new language. Those include cleaner variants that keep the same semantics (CoffeeScript, TypeScript, maybe Dart, ...) or more innovative ones, such as Elm[2], which is written in Haskell too. I'd say that a big innovation that makes the life easier is FRP (which is at the heart of Elm or React.js).
I fail yet to see what advantages PureScript brings compared to Elm.
0: https://github.com/kripken/emscripten 1: http://asmjs.org 2: http://elm-lang.org/
I think they fit different use cases. Elm is excellent at interactive web apps using FRP. PureScript is a little more general purpose and has a few type system features which Elm currently does not (type classes and rank N polymorphism). Also, PureScript's generated code is a bit simpler and doesn't need a runtime library.
The other major problem I have with it is that it encourages us to go back to the class-based patterns that we've been trying to get away from.
``` { "keys": ["super+v"], "command": "paste_and_indent" }, { "keys": ["super+shift+v"], "command": "paste" }, ```
Though you should always be careful when copy/pasting code.
I'm not sure how it encourages classes, I personally didn't even use classes at all for the first long period of my CoffeeScript life. And now only do sparingly.