It occurs to me that K meets most of these language design goals better than anything, and not many people have heard of it, because it's hard to read. Here is a program to list all the prime numbers between 1 and R: Oh by the way, it's faster (!!) than C. People don't use it except in niche applications because people can't look at it and see what it's doing. To me, it might as well be brainfuck with the amount of line noise it has. Readability and rapid comprehension are even more important, IMO, than brevity and power/expressiveness. That is why Python is so popular. It got all its libraries and ecosystem because it was easy to write AND easy to read, in addition to having a kind of syntactic brevity, so lots of people could rapidly iterate on it. It's not as powerful as Lisp or Haskell or whatever, but maybe it doesn't have to be for most applications. I think Nim is a language to watch for these reasons. 2_&{&/x!/:2_!x}'!R