What language would suit someone who hates anything that isn't PHP?

Question

Psst. Yes, this message is long, but so are my requirements. Please take the extra few seconds to read it
First it was QBasic, then QuickBasic, then, of all things, Visual Basic... version 1.0. On Win98. Then XP.
I made a lot of stuff with VB. 500 doesn't give a very good indication of how many things I made with VB 1.0, but I remember having more items than that in my c:\vbwin folder. VB might not look all that great visually, but it had a few things I've not found in any other language/environment, namely simplicity, freedom of use, speed, flexibility, hackability, and speed. Definately speed. It wasn't great on memory usage however - after my projects started creating 80KB binaries, VB would start to get crashy.
But VB had simplicity because it didn't use the 2873598734-options 997341234-properties 897592873562874353469582743-functions mantra of VB 6.0 nor the 9-billion-of-everything mantra of .net. I could whip up an application in that environment within seconds - indeed, I became quite a master at configuring some defaults I liked for forms and adding a hidden button that responded to the ESC key in about 7 seconds. It had freedom of use because... I could do anything with it. I could, because I was just that patient enough, use 234 perfectly aligned pictureboxes to create "the Win95 look" in a program designed to work on Windows 3.1 (yes, VB 1.0 is 16-bit ), and VB had speed because those 234 pictureboxes appeared on my running program's form when I hit F5 faster than I could blink. It had flexibility because I could shove 12MB of BMPs into my EXE and it'd run fine. It had hackability because I could import the Win16 API and work around issues in the language itself to make my applications what I wanted them to be. Did I mention the speed? Well, it was copyrighted in 1991, so was written in the good old days of the 16MHz 486!
However, all that fun was, sadly, from a while ago. Like, 8 months ago or so, probably more.
What marked the end of that period was a conversation on IRC one day: someone gave me a 5-or-so line snippet of code in PHP. It wasn't very complicated, but it showed a clean solution to something I needed to do with web development, which I was just getting into at the time - I can't really remember what the actual issue was, but I do remember that my choices were either to use the code snippet, or go through some looong complex process to complete whatever it was I wanted to do manually.
The code didn't look too scary, so I installed PHP and gave it a whirl. And I've liked, used, and abused PHP for many months following that initial "well maybe this isn't so bad". I don't mind PHP's use of 14 functions or more/less to do the same thing, or the fact that PHP isn't multithreaded. I probably wouldn't take advantage of multithreading in my code for a long time anyway, and PHP does have pcntl_fork() if I want to do two things at once in a controlled way.
However... I'm starting to outgrow PHP, and I'm a bit homesick of VB's visual ease of use as well. I want an environment that lets me drag'n'drop a picturebox onto a form, shove a pile of pictureboxes inside of it, then programmatically manage them all. Yes, that's exactly the kind of thing I'd do with VB 1.0, and what do you know, I created something good from it - a simple but very usable media center-ish user interface complete with animation and it all ran fast on the PC I was using, a Pentium 3 clocked at 450MHz, with only 128MB RAM.
Yes, PHP-GTK, PHP-QT and PHP-TK do exist, and they've all failed on my system at various points: PHP-GTK compiles and works absolutely fine, but breaks PHP-CGI. PHP-QT won't compile on my system, and its compile process is just too hard to tweak so I can't try gcc-3.4 on it. And anything involving PHP-TK that doesn't amount to creating a single, empty, lifeless window titled "PHP/TK" produces warnings or segfaults.
So I'm looking for a programming language that gives me something comparable or equal to what VB 1.0 had - a visual drag'n'drop development environment that didn't visually overwhelm, compilation, and speed, and what PHP has - simplicity, readability, and bindings to/for everything that isn't desktop application development, without the VB syntax format. I'm past VB, and about to surpass PHP.
Possible candidates for a new language are pretty much anything that includes both a compiler and interpreter, looks and feels like PHP, has nothing PHP doesn't have, but offers more power by using more functions, not weird, non-C-like ASCII character soup. So, if you were to take the PHP parsing engine and couple that with a bunch of libraries that adds sane stuff like native window support, the ability to manage boxes and squares in code, and so on. OR anything equivalent. So if something had ability XYZ which I couldn't figure out how to use, but also let me complete goal ABC while *not* using XYZ, it meets my requirements. And if something has just an compiler, you'll have a bit of a hard time convincing me to like it, but if it only has an interpreter, you'll really need to sell it to me, since I'm starting to get the compilation bug again, just like I did 7-8 years ago when I gazed at the wonder that was the EXE and wanted so badly to create my own.
Also, before you list Perl, let me stop you: Perl has too many unreadabilities. "test ? abc : def" is about as far as I'm prepared to go; I far prefer English text over regular expressions, Awk and the like. Also, C is just too much. It is, probably unsurprisingly considering what you've just read, too cool for my artistic brain. I don't want a language that can do everything: I get inspired by difficulty, not being able to do whatever I want. Yes, that's how my brain works, and I need to go with the flow, not against it, so simply because C can do absolutely anything and everything, I can't use it.
I will, however, note that I also like the Bash language, and the way it works, if only it wasn't so slow!
So, to sum up, the best things I've written include a media center user interface in a language that's 17 years old (same age as me! ), a telnet server using PHP (I wrote the RFC-compliant telnet parser myself, from scratch), and lastly a textual taskbar, an IRC client, and some animations using Bash.
I want a language that is readable and doesn't try to extend or expound on its own using syntax but lets me do the thinking my own way, so I have nothing stopping me from using it for what it wasn't used for. Because isn't that what we all do with programming languages anyway?
-dav7

Answer 1

As promised...
A little simple at the moment, but it's the result of a dream... to create The Perfect Language. I just may end up calling it TPL if it works out.
; dav7's view of what The Perfect Language is
; Licensed under the Nonexistant Public License (NPL) - "do w/e you want w/ it, just give me a bit of credit."
; 30-sep-08 - ?-oct-08
; <[email protected]>
; /me invents comment blocks so he doesn't have to keep typing ;s
There. :D
Now, the problem with most common programming languages (I'm looking at you, C) is that they
- are rather unreadable
- are really hard to work with for the unknowledgable
- impose a 32768-second wait on the impatient, ADHD-infused programmer as the code file(s) compile for the
247th time
- involve a lot of typing, some of it needing to be a specific case (CAPS or lowercase)
- requires a lot of input to get something basic functional, and has a very high initial code to output
ratio: at the beginning of a project a high percentage of code is required to get a reasonable amount of
output, and only after there is a fairly decent amount of code present will the code / output ratio
decrease so that only a relatively small amount of code is needed to produce the application-specific
output desired
- is not natively very image-oriented - to display an image in a window without 5GB of libraries, I need to
know Xlib, how to decode PNGs and how to manage double-buffering
So, I want to create a language that
- is both readable AND easy to type. No, I'm not going to do a survey of what word groups are the easiest
for the eye to pick up on, or go anywhere near that extreme; rather, my language will have two "modes".
One is amazingly quick to type, and the other, while relatively minimalistic, actually uses ASCII characters
to denote function, data and flow, and my compiler/interpreter combo will have a converter that will pass
through and convert a code file from one "syntax mode" to the other.
- can be both interpreted or emitted, depending on the situation ("emitted" here means that instead of working on
something that can generate native code for 784598754 platforms myself, I'll just output C-- code or something)
- has bindings for X
- makes it very easy to debug a program
From a result-, goal- or solution-based person like myself, I don't see language design the way most others would.
I don't value a language based on its algorithmic efficiency, I value it based on ease of use. I don't see things
from a procedural perspective, but rather a tokenized object oriented tree of constructs that I must feed to the
computter to achieve the result I want. This language adheres to that principle.
So, let's get started with this new language. As I go along, I explain points of interest / trivia about whatever
I'm referring to.
; The ubiquitous "Hello World". To print something, you encase it with single or double quotes and don't assign
; any meaning to it by telling the language to set the string to a variable or test it against something. A
newline is automatically added at the end of a line of such output produced by quoting.
"Hello world!"
; variable assignment by usage. There's no "true" or "false" here. Everything uses plain, un-expounded (in that 0
won't mean false or 1 true) integers to represent state or status.
x = 1
; if/then - the '? var : abc : def' construct compares 'var', and if 'var' is 1, it executes 'abc', otherwise it
; executes 'def'. This'll print "x = 1!". This construct could be used to do anything - I'd want it to operate
; as much like the C preprocessor as possible.
? x = 1: "x = 1!" : "x = 0!"
; the previous line could also be written as:
? x: "x = 1!" : "x = 0!"
; or even:
"'x' is equal to $x, which would equal"; ? x: "TRUE" : "FALSE"; "in a lot of other programming languages."
; calling a procedure. See the procedure declaration below for more info.
test x
; a loop. Loops start with a '[' and end with a ']'. This language doesn't have any for or while loops - you
; construct those on your own.
[ ;; this demos both nested comment blocks, and the fact that I stole C's add-1 method -> ;; x++
; the ! operator breaks out of a loop. I might change this.
? x > 5: !
; Print the current index, up to 5. Using a $ next to a known variable name in a quoted string will
; print that variable's contents.
"$x"
; Now for a for-esque loop - very similar to the previous example. Note that at the beginning of the block, a
; semicolon isn't required to denote its seperation of the pre- or proceeding code behind and in front of it.
z = 0 [ z++; ? z > 10: !
"$z"
; procedure start. No definition of the function or parameters is required - variables are accessible inside
; the function as 'a', 'b', 'c', etc. When 'z' is reached the next variable is indexed as 'aa', then the next
; as 'ab', etc. Also, functions can be defined after they're called - the parser will have the entire program
; in memory before it executes a single line of it, and the compiler will likewise parse the entire program
; before outputting any C.
test:
; Yes, it looks like I have the quotes wrong, but I don't. This language allows for Bash-style
; variable-string combination ;)
"ohai from teh procedure! You passed "$a"!"
; procedure end. Note that I start with "proc:" and end with ":proc" - this makes it very easy to see
; what function I might be seeing the end of if it's long and I can see any function starts.
:test
; Now for everything demoed here as a one-liner.
"Hello world!"; x = 1; ? x: "x = 1!" : "x = 0!"; "'x' is equal to $x, which would equal"; ? x: "TRUE" : "FALSE"; "in a lot of other programming languages."; test; [ ? x > 5: !; "$x" ] z = 0 [ z++; ? z > 10: !; "$z" ] test: "ohai from teh procedure!" :test
; And now for everything in its slightly more readable form...
"Hello world!"
x = 1
if x = 1 then "x = 1!" else "x = 0!"
if x then "x = 1!" else "x = 0!"
"'x' is equal to $x, which would equal"; if x then "TRUE" else "FALSE"; "in a lot of other programming languages."
test
[ x++
if x is greater than 5 then break
; OR
; if x > 5 then break
"$x"
z = 0 [ z++; if z > 10 then !
"$z"
test:
"ohai from teh procedure!"
:test
; And now for this version as its oneliner:
"Hello world!"; x = 1; if x then "x = 1!" else "x = 0!"; "'x' is equal to $x, which would equal"; ? x: "TRUE" : "FALSE"; "in a lot of other programming languages."; test; [ if x is greather than 5 then break; "$x" ] z = 0 [ z++; if z > 10 then break; "$z" ] test: "ohai from teh procedure!" :test
That's about it.
What do you think?
What language has the closest syntax as mine?
Is this language viable? Could it survive actually being developed?
Please do let me know your opinions/comments/suggestions/flames.
-dav7