I've admired Bruce's work since Thinking in Java. I've also enjoyed a merry-go-round of languages in my own career. I too was interested in Scala and read Odersky's book - and improved a lot as a programmer because of it, despite not using Scala for any "real" project. I can't say I've ever found Python that compelling. Rust and Go don't do much for me. The 2 languages I'm excited about right now are Elm and Nim.

Nim empowers the programmer to do just about anything, use GC or switch to manual MM, target any computing platform that supports C (i.e. everything), reinvent the language with macros, while packaging it up very elegantly indeed.

Elm promises almost the exact opposite. I mean it's elegant, but it's also limited - purely functional, immutable, no nulls, no unchecked list access. And that's the kind of limitation that addresses the problem that Bruce has with other languages - dealing with all the complexity of how something's working. The promise of Elm is that if your code compiles, it works, leaving you to focus on getting the important stuff right - information flow and business logic - instead of tracking down another silly invalidity that never should have made it to runtime.

They're both young, but I wish Andreas Rumpf (Nim) and Evan Czaplicki (Elm) and their teams all the best in taking on the "big boys" with these plucky languages, and would encourage Bruce Eckel to consider skipping ahead of the curve and writing for these alternatives.