Is there a high-level language for the web?

Question

Preamble

To build dynamic web-sites, we have to master at least four languages:

• HTML for the structure of web pages
• CSS for layout and design
• JavaScript for interactivity
• A language for business rules or dynamic driven data

In addition, there's SQL for persistent storage, Memcache for sessions and caching, APIs for the many different content management systems. We should also consider interacting with OpenID, Facebook, Twitter, OpenSocial in building a web application, for it to be interesting.

All in all, it's an utter mess!

If you take into account two objectives:

• Teaching web development to kids
• Staying productive as a team

Question

What high level systems exist that unify HTML + CSS + Javascript + (Insert High Level Language here, PHP preferred)?

---

Background

1. I am a software engineer with 15+ years of experience as project lead and developer with technologies like Broadvision, Autonomy, Enterprise Java, and Oracle.

During recent years, I have focused on the developing community websites, using Drupal or PHP frameworks such as CakePHP. I like web development and enjoy the impedance mismatch between the technologies involved. Still the inevitable conclusion I come to is there must be a better way.

2. I am the father of two sons (13 and 9), and while I don't want them to become programmers I would like them to comprehend computers as more than gaming machines. I like to motivate them to tinker a bit with web development to express themselves.

Whenever I show them bits and pieces, I would love for them to have a toolset that allows them to create "interesting" results in an hour or two on a Sunday afternoon.

Answer 1

GWT goes someway towards being a high level toolkit, letting you write Java to produce Javascript.

Answer 2

"Links is a new programming language designed to make web programming easier. . . Links eases the impedance mismatch problem by providing a single language for all three tiers. The system generates code for each tier; for instance, translating some code into Javascript for the browser, some into a bytecode for the server, and some into SQL for the database."

At first I wasn't going to post this, since it's a research project, not a production system; but all these answers saying "that's how it is, deal with it" begged for a counterexample.