In an interesting discussion on Lambda the Ultimate about Richard Hamming's views on research I found a reference to the language Nice which has also been discussed on LtU. Nice is based on Java, and compiles to java bytecode, but adds some interesting features such as Parametric types, Anonymous functions (lighter weight than anonymous classes), Multi-methods (similar to Pythons mixins), Tuples (multiple return values from a method), and Optional parameters to methods (take default values when not specified in call). Interesting to see how popular this becomes.