joeysmith's Journal: My Ideal Scripting Language

I think if I want it, I'm going to have to write it myself. The most time I've spent thinking about it so far is to decide what I do (and don't) want, based on current languages:

From Python, I'd like to keep the clean OOP. I think Guido, et al, have done a really good job on this. But, even after using python a little more in my own projects, I just can't seem to adjust to the whitespace thing (more on that later). Additionally, I don't understand why dictionaries are declared with {}, but keys are looked for with []. It seems to me they should have either gone with {} on dictionary keys always, or [].

From Perl, I'd like to keep is the large module base. In fact, if I ever actually write my language, I'll probably try to "launch" it by reimplementing much of CPAN in my language. Or, maybe I'll be able to easily transform from Perl to YASLWIC. I'd like to lose a lot of the syntax and replace things like $|, $`, etc. with something like a pragma. In fact, I also would like to make the Python whitespace behaviour OPTIONALLY available with a pragma-like construct, but more flexible (and I want {} back as block delimiters). PCRE is obviously a keeper. mod_perl is powerful, but (along with mod_python) a pain for admins to setup correctly IMO.

From PHP, I'd like to keep the manual, the C-ish-ness of the syntax, and the ease of integration with webservers. I'd like to get rid of "userland code as a 2nd class citizen", and pretty much toss the memory model.

I should probably look more into ruby, and I'd like to have a way for my lanuage to be able to switch between OOP, imperative, and functional programming models relatively transparently to the user.

I've even got the domain! Who wants to help? :))