Part of it was insight, part of it was hope but what's coming to light is that players of all size want to kill javascript... badly.
jQuery was the missing event dispatcher, coffeescript was the missing syntax and google tried to bury it altogether with Dart. And now Microsoft offers up its own "solution" typescript.
http://www.typescriptlang.org/

Typescript however has me paying attention. Mainly because it might be what I've been suggesting they do with js from the beginning. Fix it. This might be the set of actionscript style language elements and compilers we've been hoping for. We'll see.