I can't see getting back to it now, either; lets face it, a huge bonus for any programming language choice is its popularity, so that others will maintain your code, so that you can get help and code fragments with a quick google.

You may want to check out Factor. Both the language and its libraries are actively being developed. It is concatenative like Forth, with a strong Lisp influence.

i forget the guy's name, but he was a behavioral economist, and he was attempting to explain the recent economic meltdown in the terms of his profession, and why the whole notion of rational actors in a rational marketplace is a crock

Pretty sure you're talking about Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational. It's an educational read -- I highly recommend it.