I&#x27;ve admired Bruce&#x27;s work since Thinking in Java. I&#x27;ve also enjoyed a merry-go-round of languages in my own career. I too was interested in Scala and read Odersky&#x27;s book - and improved a lot as a programmer because of it, despite not using Scala for any &quot;real&quot; project. I can&#x27;t say I&#x27;ve ever found Python that compelling. Rust and Go don&#x27;t do much for me. The 2 languages I&#x27;m excited about right now are Elm and Nim.<p>Nim empowers the programmer to do just about anything, use GC or switch to manual MM, target any computing platform that supports C (i.e. everything), reinvent the language with macros, while packaging it up very elegantly indeed.<p>Elm promises almost the exact opposite. I mean it&#x27;s elegant, but it&#x27;s also limited - purely functional, immutable, no nulls, no unchecked list access. And that&#x27;s the kind of limitation that addresses the problem that Bruce has with other languages - dealing with all the complexity of how something&#x27;s working. The promise of Elm is that if your code compiles, it works, leaving you to focus on getting the important stuff right - information flow and business logic - instead of tracking down another silly invalidity that never should have made it to runtime.<p>They&#x27;re both young, but I wish Andreas Rumpf (Nim) and Evan Czaplicki (Elm) and their teams all the best in taking on the &quot;big boys&quot; with these plucky languages, and would encourage Bruce Eckel to consider skipping ahead of the curve and writing for these alternatives.