Lambda the Ultimate

Guy Steele leads a small team of researchers in Burlington, Massachusetts, who are taking on an enormous challenge -- create a programming language better than Java... Think of it as Java for scientists, Java for the programmers of a peta-scale supercomputer.

You just have to love this quote from Steele: I'm now not convinced that a single programming language can serve everyone's needs, because the needs are so diverse. Well, duh...

But obviously Steele knew this long ago. Anyway, Fortress seems to be concerned with notation ("with square root signs and exponents placed above the line"), in the hope that that's going to be enough to lure Fortran programmers. Time will tell.