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Being sceptical about succes does not mean it's a bad idea, I'm doing some research myself, on a new language of which I'm not too sure about its success - but still, it's a good idea.

It is an ultra cool geek language. You can program and see results immediately. The syntax is ultra-clean. It's WORA. And the whole system is under an extremely liberal license.

Python is missing:

Native HTTPS support.

Good widget set (small, portable, and simple - preferably built in too).

Native compiler (bytecode is great...but for some things it's too slow. Gimme a binary).

Powerful graphics primitives.

Easier stack manipulation (hacked pushing and popping isn't a real stack, guys)

Some of these shortcomings are present in other languages, like REBOL and Java, and of course the incredible Squeak (add your own primitives and customize the entire VM in a subset of the language itself)!

But overall, Python is still my favourite language, and I know a few (Squeak/Smalltalk, C, tons of Basic variants, Java, Shell, and a bit of Perl)....but it WOULD be nice if the Python team addressed the concerns above.

Lisp is so great not because of some magic quality visible only to devotees but because it is simply the most powerful language available. If you agree with this, try REBOL. REBOL also appears as a weird AI language, with a bizarre syntax full of parentheres (replace with brackets for REBOL) and is a very high level language. The difference is that REBOL as built-in support for CGI, so you can also use it for the back-end. Dolmen.

Go look at rebol.
It too is commercial but it's much much cheaper.
It has a tiny download and very small code which runs faster. It runs on just about any platform you could think of.
Oh yea the obligatory link

That's 256KB, not 256MB, and starting from release 2.0(version 37.0), the ROM was 512KB.

The author of Exec, Carl Sassenrath, is working on Rebol, go check it out.

Interesting links on Self can be found here.

Where Pliant syntax is discussed, it is said that it is original because "The Pliant parser is original in that it doesn't rely on an automaton derived from a grammar. It is simpler, but more customizable and therefore much more powerful. "

I'd like to point out that the parsing extensibility of Pliant can be found in the Forth language and I believe that Rebol may also have some of these advantages. The language Lua also comes to mind as a language with syntactic extensibility.

---

RJ Mical: Currently living with his wife and four lovely children on the San Francisco Peninsula. He's written a book (fiction), and is searching for a publisher.

Carl Sassenrath: Created and currently distributing the REBOL programming language.

Dale Luck: When not restoring his massive menagerie of vintage coin-op video games, he works for a digital PBX/telephony company in the Bay Area.

Dave Needle: Still inventing and building cool hardware hacks at his own pace, and installs $1500 bathroom faucets at the behest of his loving wife, Margo.

Still some of the coolest people I have been privileged to know.

Schwab

Here's another new programming language which would is great for both beginners and seasoned professionals. It's called Rebol.

Check this out and see if this meme can
be turned into a GNU interpreter of rebol...

http://www.rebol.com/nutshell.html

look at replacetext.r. And as for candygrammar look at alien.r and the stuff on dialects in the nutshell.
That all being said, I'm not throwing out GCC and scrapping Perl and Java. It does look like a great quicky
and one-shot scripter especially for the network.
The main advantage is a 119k cross-platform distribution with built-in
help and documentation and no libraries to track down and install. Beat that with [insert viable language of your choice]!
This is the kinda thing I can give my pointy-haired boss's secretary so she can write a clue filter on his email and pull down his football pool scores.

look at replacetext.r. And as for candygrammar look at alien.r and the stuff on dialects in the nutshell.
That all being said, I'm not throwing out GCC and scrapping Perl and Java. It does look like a great quicky
and one-shot scripter especially for the network.
The main advantage is a 119k cross-platform distribution with built-in
help and documentation and no libraries to track down and install. Beat that with [insert viable language of your choice]!
This is the kinda thing I can give my pointy-haired boss's secretary so she can write a clue filter on his email and pull down his football pool scores.

look at replacetext.r. And as for candygrammar look at alien.r and the stuff on dialects in the nutshell.
That all being said, I'm not throwing out GCC and scrapping Perl and Java. It does look like a great quicky
and one-shot scripter especially for the network.
The main advantage is a 119k cross-platform distribution with built-in
help and documentation and no libraries to track down and install. Beat that with [insert viable language of your choice]!
This is the kinda thing I can give my pointy-haired boss's secretary so she can write a clue filter on his email and pull down his football pool scores.

Then I guess it's not just a coincidence that the Founder and CEO of the rebol company has "design and implementation of the highly acclaimed Amiga multitasking operating system" in his bio.

netwiz opined:

I dunno. I saw Rexx on OS/2, it's native platform (next to mainframe), and it beat the hell out of DOS batch files.

I once tried to maintain a database-backed website whose glue was in Rexx. Yes, it blew the doors off DOS batch files. Quite a complete little language with some nice features. Unfortunately, I had the same allergic reaction to it that I always have when I try to read FORTRAN. Its design was very much rooted in the IBM mainframe culture, and it gave me the heebie-jeebies. I'm not being fascitious; something about its worldview bothered me in a very visceral way.

I'd be interested to hear what people who've worked in mainframe culture think about Rexx. I'm very much a *nix person, and just don't understand that point of view. How did it feel to use something like that on the desktop? What's your reaction to today's unix (or windows) dominated environment (and people like me)?

REBOL at least seems to have lost those awful capital letters, despite its retro 70s-language name. They need a retro-chiq logo to go with the name, instead of copying wired