My personal alternative is to read Javascript: The Good Parts and just get better at Javascript. I don't see the sense in adding a fiddly, potentially fragile

My personal alternative is to read Javascript: The Good Parts and just get better at Javascript. I don't see the sense in adding a fiddly, potentially fragile additional layer of code to the client side -- to say nothing of tying myself to Microsoft -- just so that I can use Ruby syntax instead of Javascript syntax. Yeah, I like Ruby, but it's not like Ruby is some kind of massive feature or performance win. It might be different if the browser only supported assembly language, or FORTRAN, but Javascript is pretty nice. I mean, what's next? A Python port of jQuery to run in your Python-enabled Silverlight application? Don't we have something better to do?