[mistercow]

It seems to me like using symbols instead of words makes the most sense. It wouldn't be particularly harder to use for English speakers, and it might actually make code easier to read, since there would be less cognitive load in distinguishing keywords from identifiers.

[angersock]

Yeah, okay:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_%28programming_language%29

[mistercow]

Yeah, the problems there are that the symbols don't have easy to remember names, and that they can't be typed in a normal environment. Multi-character ascii symbols would be a lot more accessible.

[angersock]

J seemed to be a good step in that direction.