Jim's Depository

Here I keep a list of things I think are important for the language:

• Legibility. I appreciate the simplicity and cleanliness of lisp with its powerful macro capabilites, but I think it suffers in legibility. A programmer should be able to glance and understand, not look and decode. I think this means an Algol style syntax.
• Performance. Computers have become fast enough that interpreted scripting languages are fast enough for mid volume web sites and user intensive applications, but higher performance is needed for large web sites and compute intensive applications.
• Extensibility. The language must be able to grow syntax to support new constructs. I dislike proof by example, but the chaos of adding “for each X” functionality to javascript should serve as a fresh warning.

There are a host of other requirements that I just expect of a modern language and will not mention here. I think the ones above will serve to establish a direction.