Seconding Urbit since I'm a giant fanboy. It's not a new programming languages as much as new computer, internet, everything. And it's a lot of fun to play with - Hoon isn't nearly as difficult as it looks :)
As insane as a lot of it seems, most of it are just logical conclusions from a few base ideas: what would computers look like if you owned your own data, if it was all built on top of a purely functional VM backed by bignum binary trees, if you could replace all the mistakes made over the years (nonversioned file systems, untyped shells, manually serializing data structures)
This sounds amazing. It's almost exactly what I've been wanting to do, on an even grander scale, and by people with much greater chance of it working (even if it's only ever 'beta quality') than I would!
"Re-inventing the wheel" is a phrase usually used in derogatory manner, but it's computing has changed so much in its brief lifetime that I've often wondered why we haven't started over; shed things we don't need any more, and built everything as we would today with all those lessons learned.
It's too easy to be confused over or not sure how to accomplish something Unix-y, and for the answer to begin with "oh well because originally", or "well, you see, in the eighties.."
As insane as a lot of it seems, most of it are just logical conclusions from a few base ideas: what would computers look like if you owned your own data, if it was all built on top of a purely functional VM backed by bignum binary trees, if you could replace all the mistakes made over the years (nonversioned file systems, untyped shells, manually serializing data structures)