Lambda the Ultimate

I thought this was an interesting effort:

http://wiki.reia-lang.org/wiki/Reia_Programming_Language

Reia (pronounced RAY-uh) is a Python/Ruby-like scripting language for the Erlang virtual machine (BEAM). Reia aims to expose all the features and functionality of Erlang in a language more familiar to programmers of scripting languages, while improving string handling, regular expressions, linking with external libraries, and other tasks which are generally considered outside the scope of Erlang. Reia is distributed under the MIT License.

If it were just the syntax, that would be sort of interesting, but maybe nothing too special. However, they're also attempting to create an object system on top of Erlang, which if I'm not mistaken uses an Erlang process per object.

On a method of expressing by signs the action of machinery, Charles Babbage, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1826.

In the construction of an engine, on which I have now been for some time occupied, for the purpose of calculating tables and impressing the results on plates of copper, I experienced great delay and inconvenience from the difficulty of ascertaining from the drawings the state of motion or rest of any individual part at any given instant of time: and if it became necessary to enquire into the state of several parts at the same moment the labour was much encreased.

In the description of machinery by means of drawings, it is only possible to represent an engine in one particular state of its action. … The difficulty of retaining in the mind all the cotemporaneous and successive movements of a complicated machine, and the still greater difficulty of properly timing movements which had already been provided for, induced me to seek for some method by which I might at a glance of the eye select any particular part, and find at any given time its state of motion or rest, its relation to the motions of any other part of the machine, and if necessary trace back the sources of its movement through all its successive stages to the original moving power. I soon felt that the forms of ordinary language were far too diffuse to admit of any expectation of removing the difficulty…. It then became necessary to contrive a notation which ought if possible to be at once simple and expressive, easily understood at the commencement, and capable of being readily retained in the memory from the proper adaptation of the signs to the circumstances they were intended to represent.

Probably worth noting MISRA-C++. Not much to go on since you have to pay for the document that outlines the standards.

MISRA C++:2008 was finally released on June 5, 2008, following 3 years of work by a group of willing volunteers. They set out to craft a set of rules for the safe use of C++ in critical systems...

It seems not so long ago that the insurrection to fork a safer subset of C++ in Europe was suppressed. Instead of redefining the language, the efforts are now on trying to enforce coding standards and best practices. Try to solve things on the engineering side, rather than the programming language specification side.