I'd second Haxe, there's a lot of nice things going on in that space, and the language itself[0] has a lot of nice [1] features too, things like algebraic data types and static typing make me slightly less queasy with the idea of writing a game which also deploys to the web (and somewhere else for that matter once you realise you want a native app). (writing a game in it myself right now too)

You're probably going to be going through some more untested ground (compared to working in straight JS if you're going for web), but I quite like working in Haxe personally, and the #haxe irc channel at freenode is very helpful :)

I think it's weird to say process doesn't matter, it definitely does, the fact that (some parts of) the gamedev world sticks almost entirely to "tested" technologies is more a sign of it's conservativeness than anything else. (okay, it's not just that (cue endless memory and performance arguments), but in large part, it really is!, okay and sure friction may be slightly less in something which is more well used, but that's not an excuse to not go for the interesting alternatives!)

So for the OP, if you want to learn an interesting, but sort of fringe language, take a look at haxe (people like: http://grapefrukt.com/) use it for game dev for example!

[0] http://haxe.org/manual/lf-pattern-matching-guards.html [1] http://haxe.org/documentation/introduction/language-features...