You want to check out concatenative programming[1] and particularly #concatenative on Freenode. Factor[2] is the preeminent concatenative language at this time. It is dynamically typed and comes with an excellent interactive environment and a fairly large collection of libraries. It feels very much like “Lisp done right”—which is to say that it’s very practical, and you get much more composability and metaprogramming power without all the parentheses.

Joy[3] was the first language to be described as “concatenative”, invented by the late Manfred von Thun; its operation is defined as a term rewriting system, but it can be implemented using a stack. If you want some theoretical background, Brent Kirby’s Theory of Concatenative Combinators[4] may be enlightening. Cat[5] was the first statically typed concatenative language, and Kitten is my successor to Cat.

If you’re looking at Rust, Kitten[6][7] is designed with similar goals in mind. It’s a language about safe, expressive abstractions with predictable, low runtime costs. It encourages expressing programs as compositions of effects. It is not usable for production but may be fun to play around with; we are currently working on a native backend.

[1]: http://concatenative.org

[2]: http://factorcode.org/

[3]: http://www.kevinalbrecht.com/code/joy-mirror/joy.html

[4]: http://tunes.org/~iepos/joy.html

[5]: http://cat-language.com/

[6]: http://kittenlang.org/

[7]: https://github.com/evincarofautumn/kitten