It'd be even easier with a clean bytecode, and it wouldn't require nearly as much effort and round-about solutions. It also would simplify portable tool development, including source-level debuggers.
And if we're living in a fantasy world, we can all get a pony, too. The fact remains that JavaScript is widely deployed and has multiple viable competing implementations. Any hypothetical bytecode format starts at a huge disadvantage due to this reality. The path of least resistance here is to target JavaScript.
The "path of least resistance" has not been particularly successful in helping the web provide a robust platform for application development over the past 10 years. I don't see why the hack-and-slash "pragmatism" should be expected to start working now.
Now you are just smoking crack. The web is hands-down the most widely used application platform in the world, and you're going to claim it's not a robust platform for application development? I don't know what planet you live on.
The web is the most widely used document platform in the world.
And no, it's not a robust application development platform. Working with it is an exercise in constant compromise between bad technologies and the quality of the user experience.
You're smoking something too, if you're equating the content-centric web with the breadth and depth of the market of native mobile and desktop apps.
Of course, I also get a better experience from the NYTimes mobile app; it's simply that the web can do content less badly than it can do apps.
I shudder in horror at writing one of our large apps in JavaScript, maintaining it, and desperately trying to keep frame rates up (yes, that does matter to more than just games), conform to some sane semblance of platform standards to which users are accustomed, reuse a platform widget toolkit, etc.
The myopia of the web crowd is why your platform continues to suck.
