The Julia Programming Language

Well you are being a bit nitpicky as pypy is both the python implementation and the JIT/Rpython/framework bit. What I mean was someone holding very close to the python implementation in almost everything (syntax etc.) but streamlining it/breaking compatibility/giving it a new name ("python3-as-it-should-have-been" perhaps?).

Further, if we are going to be nitpicky, when you use something like that for its intended purpose it's still a fork - I forked Twitter bootstrap for my new project/I used Twitter bootstrap for my new project - so "you wouldn't fork PyPy" is a false statement.

That's pretty common for new language implementations - Node.js was around for a couple of years before the Windows port was ready.

To be honest, if you're targeting early adopters of a programming language Linux and Mac support is probably a lot more important than Windows. Smart Windows users can always run Linux in a VM.

I wonder what they think about or have learned from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_(programming_language) , another recent-ish attempt to deliver a modern and powerful scientific programming language.

Personally I'm a little wary of being ghettoised into something overly domain-specific for scientific/numerical computing. Really good interop may mitigate that -- something which can navigate the unholy mix of C, C++, fortran, matlab, octave, R and python routines one comes across trying to reproduce others research work, would indeed be awesome.

I do wonder if some of the noble demands of this project might be better delegated to library developers though, after adding a bare minimum of syntax and feature support to a powerful general-purpose language. For now Python+numpy+scipy seems a great 90% solution here.

Much praise!! These guys have incredibly good taste. Almost every single thing I can think of that I want in a programming language, they have it. All in the one language!

The fact that it has parametric types, parametric polymorphism, macros, performance almost as good as C, good C/Fortran interop, 64 bit integers and an interactive REPL all in the one language just blows my mind.

I wasn't able to tell if it is possible to overload operators, which is another thing essential to mathematical code.

I was also unsure why the keyword end was needed at the end of code blocks. It seems that indentation could take care of that.

I also didn't see bignums as a default type (though you can use an external library to get them).

However, all in all, I think this is the first 21st Century language and find it very exciting!

this is surprisingly complete for a relatively new(?) project.

one notable restriction is that inheritance is only for interface, not implementation.

also, can anyone find a sequence abstraction (like lists)? arrays seem to be fixed size and i don't see anything else apart from coroutines. am i missing something?!

[perhaps not, if it's intended for numerical work. on reflection i am moving more and more towards generators (in python) and iterables (in java, using the guava iterables library to construct maps, filters etc) rather than variable length collections, so maybe this is not such a big deal. it's effectively how clojure operates, too...]