Yes, it's not a brand-new dimension of programming languages, merely a refinement of existing ideas. However I'm not aware of anything quite like it out there.

Yes, it's not a brand-new dimension of programming languages, merely a refinement of existing ideas. However I'm not aware of anything quite like it out there. Lisp could be used to implement it, but, I mean, that's not a very strong statement now is it? Lisp can be used to implement anything. The question is about whether it exists. Partially I throw this idea out as a bone to those who like dynamic languages. Personally I don't have this problem anymore because I've basically given them up, except in cases where the problem is too small to matter. And if you already know and like Lisp, you don't really have this problem either. But if you are a devotee of the 1990s dynamic scripting languages, you're getting really squeezed right now by performance issues. You can run 40-50x slower than C, or you can run circa 10x slower than C with an amazing JIT that requires a ton of effort and will forever be very quirky with performance, and in both cases you'll be doing quite a lot of work to use more than one core at a time. Python is just hanging in there with the amazing amount of work being poured into NumPy, and from what I gather from my limited interactions with data scientists, as data sets get larger and the pipelines more complex, the odds you'll fall out of what NumPy can do and fall back to pure Python goes up and the price of that goes up too. I think a new dynamic scripting language built from the ground up to be multithreadable and high performance via some techniques like this would have some room to run, and while hordes of people will come out of the woodwork promising that one of the existing ones will get there Real Soon Now, just wait, they've almost got it, the reality is I think that the current languages have pretty much been pushed as far as they can be. Unless someone writes this language, dynamic scripting languages are going to continue slowly, quite slowly, but also quite surely, just getting squeezed out of computing entirely. I mean, I'm looking at the road ahead and I'm not sure how Go or C# is going to navigate a world where even low-end CPUs casually have 128 cores on consumer hardware.... Python qua Python is going to face a real uphill battle when the decision to use it entails basically committing to not only using less than 1% of the available cores (without offloading on to the programmer a significant amount of work to get past that), but also using that core ~1.5 orders of magnitude less efficiently than a compiled language. You've always had to pay some to use Python, sure, but that's an awful lot of orders of magnitude for "a nice language". Surely we can have "a nice language" for less price than that.