Alternatives to JavaScript

Question

At the moment, the only fully supported language, and the de-facto standard for DOM tree manipulation in the browser is JavaScript. It looks like it has deep design issues t

Answer 1

As already said, you have Flash (ActionScript, which is a derived language from Javascript) and Silverlight/Moonlight (IronPython, IronRuby, JScript, VBScript, C#) that can run in the browser via plugins (the first one being much more ubiquitous).

There is also another alternative if you like Ruby: HotRuby, it's a ruby implementation in javascript that will run in the browser. It is not very mature yet, but you can have a look at it.