Perhaps your next programming language? Thorn. (A JVM scripting language.)

John Field’s talk at JAOO in Århus 2009 is about that. Here is the interesting blurb from that page:

Scripting languages are justifiably popular because of their support for rapid and exploratory development. However, scripts are notoriously hard to compose and to evolve. Additionallly, though more and more applications require concurrency – for example, to manage interaction with remote distributed services – support for concurrency in existing scripting languages is weak at best. In this talk, I will describe and demonstrate Thorn, a new concurrent scripting language being developed by IBM and Purdue University. I will show how Thorn’s module and type annotation features support the evolution of scripts into industrial-grade programs. I will also show how Thorn’s concurrency features can be used to rapidaly develop scalable applications, while avoiding many of the pitfalls of Java-style concurrency.

This is interesting, why? My buddies Tobbe and Johan Ö (out of DSV, Stockholm) have implemented it (as part of a team). They’ve been away so long to do it. I miss them.

If you were also at the Nordic Perl Workshop 2008, you could’ve seen the amazing “vaporware presentation” they did. Among other amazing details, they speed-implemented a design-by-contract feature from a previous presentation which had been presented on Day 1, so that they could show it in their Day 2 slot.

Re-reading the above, I can see it’s quite buzzword-compliant. Would be interesting to actually program a bit in Thorn.