Yesterday I spent about 1/2 hour looking at the Scala programming language with Bill Venners (who recently wrote a weblog entry on Artima about how the joy had gone out of Java programming for him -- a big admission from such a dedicated Java programmer). This is specifically designed to work on top of the JVM, but with much higher-level concepts and more succinct coding (type inference, for example). The most interesting thing to me about Scala is the built-in support for agent-based programming (although the last time I looked, that part of the tutorial hadn't been written yet). But other parts of the language, in particular its support for functional programming, is also quite interesting. Bill especially liked the idea that he could use standard Java components (or pay for standard Java programmers to build such components), but consume them with a more productive language like Scala, which still has static type checking and so fit his needs better.