Much of what he desires out of his ideal programming environment sounds eerily like CL or SmallTalk (though possibly closer to CL). The textual representation

Much of what he desires out of his ideal programming environment sounds eerily like CL or SmallTalk (though possibly closer to CL). The textual representation of CL code IS the AST. You can change it to be whatever you want. You can programmatically manipulate the code objects represented by that tree using the same forms and idioms you use on plain old data. There's very little magic that happens "under the hood." I can't even imagine how awesome the CL ecosystem could be with someone like Paul on its side. sigh I've been putting in some time to learn Scala but he elucidates much of what bugs me about the language in this talk. I'm hoping to see a, "Good Parts" book but I'm not sure if that's a good sign.