Yah, I'm skeptical of any language whose job is simply to make writing another language prettier. If the problems of the lower language leak through, then you have to be fluent in two languages for a single problem.

To all would-be language designers out there: Are you aiming to fix a perceived language deficiency or a problem-solving deficiency?

C, Perl, etc. are abstractions of the problem of programming, not the problem of writing assembly.

In contrast, HAML is an abstraction of the problem of noisy HTML, not an abstraction of the problem of page layout.