Thanks. CoffeeScript looks interesting - quite Rubyish, although I'd be a bit worried that by going that route I'm going to end up having to learn both syntaxes (syntaxi ?-) to understand / debug the resulting JavaScript, or to make use of other JS code snippets.
Interesting blog article BTW, and part of the reason I picked JS to have a bash at.
Thank you! Those first two look very promising. I'd found the Crockford Files (!) before, and whilst they look interesting for historical reasons, much of it was lost on me at this stage.