JavaScript is a great programming language to learn for those that have no background in programming. Mastering JavaScript is quite rewarding as you are essentially developing for the Web and that means your applications will work across all desktop and mobile platforms. While there are plenty of JavaScript resources on the Web, first-timers may find JavaScript a bit intimidating to learn. This is why some ambitious developers including Google decided to come up with compilers that harness and enhance the power of JavaScript while making the language far more accessible. Here are some of the languages that are worth checking out.
Dart
Dart is Google’s pet project so you don’t have to worry about the project becoming abandoned (Google last updated Dart last July 4, 2014 at the time of writing). Performance is one of the main focuses of Dart as Google wants to push developers into making faster performing Web applications while easing the learning curve all at once. The fact that only Google Chrome supports this language may turn off a few developers but at least Google Chrome enjoys its current position as the world’s most popular Web browser.
CoffeeScript
CoffeeScript is one of the more popular JavaScript compilers as it has the spirit of Ruby and the ubiquity of JavaScript. It is basically a more readable version of JavaScript as you don’t have to use as many punctuation marks as JavaScript. Master the language and you could find yourself writing CoffeeScript snippets that could take 3 times as much code if using JavaScript without affecting the overall performance.
LiveScript
CoffeeScript was so popular that developers decided to use it as a basis to make coding even more accessible. LiveScript is one of the known CoffeeScript variants. It is based on Haskell rather than Ruby and it surprisingly allows for even shorter lines of codes to be written. It is a powerful JavaScript alternative especially if you frequently work with functions.