One of my favorites along those lines is a new little language called 
CoffeeScript, which takes the good parts -- not even all of the good parts, 
but a nice little language -- and comes up with groovy new syntax for it, which
is minimal. It's almost like dandelions: little fluffs of programs that do 
everything that conventional JavaScript programs do. You can't do anything in 
that language that you can't do in JavaScript, so it's all cosmetic. I don't
know if all or much of that will find its way into JavaScript, because I'm not
sure there's enough of a payoff there. But just as an experiment, as a design 
exercise, I think it's a brilliant piece of work. I'm excited to see stuff 
like that happening. 