[goatlover]

Sounds something like Haskell with a Smalltalk environment. Functional, statically typed with powerful type extensions, but with an image instead of text files that you modify.

From just using Jupyter Notebooks, I can see the appeal of working with a live environment, and it's just a fancy REPL, not a full Lisp or Smalltalk environment.

[cm2187]

If it has to be a general public language, I'm afraid it will have to be light on special characters and abbreviations or acronyms that made sense 30 years ago. I'd say a Basic or Python-like language, but modernised, and with strong typing to enable the IDE to help a lot the users with auto-completion and error checking.

But if you think about it, most business users are even intimidated by VBA. So it will have to be very fluffy, and I don't think you can spare the mandatory coding 101 teaching at school.

[bpicolo]

Programming is describing a solution space, and we describe things with words. I don't see how anything but text/speech would map to that aspect of programming.