I just saw that Nikhil Kothari has posted his work on creating a C# to JavaScript compiler. This is quite similar to the Google Web Toolkit that I posted about earlier.

While I like some of the ideas about GWT and Script# – avoiding the context switch away from your primary programming language, it feels like the wrong thing to do. Rails RJS Templates is a superior solution because it avoids trying to map Ruby 1:1 to JavaScript. Instead it maps to Rails’ domain specific language for describing client-side / server interactions.

I wonder if it will help novice JavaScript developers though, and whether that help will be worth it. It steers them away from JavaScript and back towards C#, but they’re going to have to learn the semantics of the browser object model + add-on libraries in any event. Those semantics (not to mention most of the docs / samples they’re likely to find via Google) are going to mesh far better with JavaScript than with C#).