Lambda the Ultimate

Seasonal greetings to everybody, I am back from my vacation, and have a new urge to program and probably learn some new language in the process :-)

I am looking for a PL for programming an interactive simulation - not really a game, but a simple world with moving agents which can be influenced by the user (ask your children about hatching norns to get an idea :-) ).

The PL should probably actively support concurrency, pickling/unpickling, have good libraries for graphics/mouse/sound, and be reasonably fashionable.

I am currently hesitating between Erlang and Alice, any ideas?

Thanks!

Michael Rys reports on his experience in XML 2004 and links to his paper and presentation,

The presentation will outline how XQuery and XML conceptually fit into a relational database environment. It will cover the organization of the XML in the database, how to type it using W3C XML Schema, how to query it both in conjunction with SQL and using top-level XQuery. It will present the concepts, talk about new developments in the ISO/ANSI SQL/XML standards and present some demos of XQuery in the upcoming Microsoft SQL Server 2005.