Is backward transliteration from pure JavaScript to Spider possible so that one can deal exclusively with Spider and not have to learn JS in order to deal with other people's code?
If one must know both in order to be an agent in the real world then its utility is somewhat limited.
Interesting comment; it seems to imply that some people will learn Spider before JavaScript. Whenever I come across one of these compile-to-JS languages I take it as "this makes you more productive, as long as you've learned JS first and understand the mapping".
Spider does look like it would actually be a really cool first language to learn!
> Is backward transliteration from pure JavaScript to Spider possible
Yep, this is important to avoid the "Groovy" problem where Groovy is valid Java, except for lots of little cases where it isn't, e.g. == behaves differently, default member access behaves differently, etc etc. Since Java 8 lambdas, Groovy is now wildly different in its syntax.
Groovy is a JVM language which is dynamically typed (a la python and ruby). It never really took off, partly because you had to understand java (and the JVM) pretty well in order to do anything other than trivial scripts with it.
The point being made is that if Spider wants to take off, it had best not require an intimate knowledge of javascript - and we can look to groovy to see what happens otherwise.
If one must know both in order to be an agent in the real world then its utility is somewhat limited.