Because there aren't enough programming languages in the world yet, Google has debuted Dart, a JavaScript alternative.
I haven't actually had a chance to look too in depth to this, as this last weekend I was knee deep in (Canadian) Thanksgiving, turkey, and relatives, but it looks like Dart is aimed as a replacement to Javascript, not an easier way of writing it (as something like CoffeeScript is). Of course for this to work you'd have to have it adopted in all mainstream browsers, or have fallbacks to Javsascript (for older browsers like IE6 that are still in use but aren't going to be ever updated with new technology). Of course Chrome will support it, and if it's good enough, hopefully will propagate out into other browsers.
You can check out more of the language at http://www.dartlang.org, including tutorials and tech overviews.
Update: You can look at this gist as well (link from reddit) to see what happens when dart is compiled to Javascript. The github comments are worth scrolling through 17,000+ lines of compiled Javascript.