jordandanford

Many interpreted programming languages are implemented in C: Python, Ruby, Lua, Io...

Mac OS X is generally seen as the most visually appealing OS, so I figure that's likely to be the reasoning

Wow, you're pretty sheltered if F# is the weirdest language you've ever seen

I've always gotten the impression that Lua has a somewhat anemic standard library and a somewhat limited set of abstractions, in contrast to the things that draw me to Python – is this still accurate? Python, Ruby, etc. have a wide range of built-in functionality, which allows them to stand on their own, whereas Lua seems to be intended for use with C programs and libraries, keeping it in the game/scripting world. Are these assumptions still accurate? (Also, indexing from one is just frustrating when almost everything else is zero-based!)

DotCloud is pretty flexible and has open registration: www.dotcloud.com

It doesn't need to make a bold statement, it's about being small and well-designed. Performance wise, C++ is still far ahead, but Go is substantially easier to use.

I've been experimenting with Go, and I feel like you're expecting something different than what it's supposed to be. In my opinion, one of its strengths is its simplicity – it may not always be elegant, but it's consistent and readable, and there's usually one obvious way to do things (similar to Python). For some areas of programming, it strikes a nice balance between performance (native compilation) and usability (garbage collection, concurrency, etc.) for making fast, reliable software. Spend more time with Scala if you want a large, fancy language.