Hello Paul,

Interesting article. I am still looking at the linked material.

Have you looked at Lua?

http://www.lua.org

A very interesting language that I like a lot. It is very small has some 
Smalltalk like characteristics, but is a Prototype language. Actually it 
seems to handle various paradigms quite well. It has objects, 
prototypes, modules, closures, coroutines, tail-recursive, etc. and a 
very clean and small implementation in C. Very, very portable, 
embeddable, and very fast. Compare it to Ruby, Python and GST on Alioth. 
It integrates easily and well with libraries written in C, etc.  It is 
the scripting language built into SciTE.

Its biggest weakness for me and many, is that it does not currently have 
a rich set of libraries. But I believe that is very doable. I would love 
to see Lua with a rich set of libraries like Python's. But it is not 
without libraries. One would just need to see if it has what one needs.

I much prefer it as a language to both Python and Ruby. Its syntax is 
clean and nice. I find it easier to think in Lua than either Python or 
Ruby. And as one who is not a computer professional, the fact that I can 
read the book over and over is a big plus. I finally understand 
closures. :)  (at least as presented in PIL2)

I am hoping that someday soon that libraries could be written for Lua 
and it have an equally rich system as Python or Ruby. A rich Lua system 
arriving around or before Python 3, Ruby 2, etc. would provide for an 
interesting alternative. And I don't believe it would have to equal 
Python's or Ruby's to be an excellent alternative to Python or Ruby.

It isn't perfect. But I think its problems are definitely fixable.

Lua is MIT licensed. So it is compatible with anything you want to do.

Just wanted to toss that out there. Didn't quite mean to get so 
evangelistic on the Squeak-list. But oh well. I love Squeak. But I've 
learned to love Lua also. I just tolerate Python, no love. :)

Again thanks for the essay.

Jimmie Houchin
Homeschooling father of 9 ;)
   Yes I read your writings on edu-sig.