I think that when you design a language you can take the low road or the high road. The low road is to design your language to explicitly interop with an existi

I think that when you design a language you can take the low road or the high road. The low road is to design your language to explicitly interop with an existing language/platform so that you can hijack its libraries. C++ took the low road by co-opting C. Scala and Clojure took the low road in co-opting Java. Languages like Arc, Smalltalk, Haskell and Eiffel took the high road and as a result they don't have as many users. Having said that, I don't want to imply that language designers are doing a bad thing when they take the "low road." They get adopters and they bring powerful tools into the world. It's just that when they do that they have to sacrifice coherence a bit.