Potential Solutions

I considered a few drastic measures to try to improve the situation:

Write an IDE (or plugin) that understands the syntax, can refactor and auto-complete where possible, etc.

* Unfortunately, I don't really have that kind of time. Anyone else want to do it? Current IDEs are getting better, but they don't understand OO syntax, primarily (I would guess) because it's totally non-standard. And even so, dynamic typing makes it difficult to write a good IDE.

Use our own markup + a javascript parser (i.e. Rhino) + some linting rules to have a "validation" or "compile" step

* A fair amount of work, not really portable, and it only solves the "things break too often" problem but none of the others around refactoring, auto-complete, etc.

Find/write better libraries

* Solves the OO syntax problems, but not the other problems

Write in some language, like Java, that has all the things I want, and then find a way to "compile" it into Javascript

* Seems like a good idea to me . . . (perhaps just me, but whatever). Since I already had a java parsing library, how hard could it be?

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