Recently someone posted Decker here on HN, a HyperCard-inspired environment. It includes its own programming language, Lil, which looks like it took some APL influences but made the core design more based on Lua. Meaning the language hopefully feels familiar enough avoid scaring people off.
I wonder if something that might be a way forward, similar to how lots of imperative languages now have language constructs that makes it easier to do functional programming in them: steal enough from the array languages to make other languages less bad. Or maybe that's what NumPy and Julia already are, which also would show the limitations of that approach. I dunno, I've read about array languages out of theoretical interest but never actually programmed in them.
I'm extremely confident that array language features will seep into the mainstream in the same way that functional programming features have been doing for the last 10 years or so.
New language designers will have to defend why they don't have array language features rather than why they do.
I wonder if something that might be a way forward, similar to how lots of imperative languages now have language constructs that makes it easier to do functional programming in them: steal enough from the array languages to make other languages less bad. Or maybe that's what NumPy and Julia already are, which also would show the limitations of that approach. I dunno, I've read about array languages out of theoretical interest but never actually programmed in them.
[0] https://beyondloom.com/decker/index.html
[1] https://beyondloom.com/decker/lil.html