Recently a programming language called CoffeeScript got some attention. CoffeeScript is a language that compiles to JavaScript and is inspired by Ruby and Python. It is more readable than JavaScript (on parts because it uses pythons significant whitespace indention) and adds some syntactic sugar while staying close to javascript's features. You can use coffeescript to do server side node.js programming or use it on the client side inside the browser.
To get started I recommend the podcasts Changelog Episode 0.2.9 and JSCONF LIVE Episode 6 with Jeremy Ashkenas the lead developer of DocumentCloud and creator of underscore.js.
Another area CoffeScript might fit in is mobile HTML5 development. People already build iPhone apps with titanium and coffescript, 37signals iphone app chalk is built with CoffeeScript and Ryan Singer of 37signals mentioned building a Rails like framework for HTML5 Mobile Apps based on CoffeScript. The templating language for the framework seems to be eco and is already available on github.