I haven’t gone over the language specs yet so I can’t judge the details, although the basic “Hello I18N World” app has rather hideous syntax. To my fragile Java-oriented mind this looks like some mutated JS.

Skimming over the buzzword list does revel some things that are sourly missing from Java – tuples and closures, for instance. Regardless, one can argue that past a certain point added syntax is nothing more than semantic sugar. Certainly a language doesn’t really NEED tuple support. In the end it’s the massive Java (or, alternatively, .Net) API that makes it strong. Surely it’s not the stripped-down C++ syntax that made it attractive.

In general what we need a is a widely accepted CLI-like solution.