I respect the author's dedication, but I think he has his priorities completely wrong (and I told him so last year): how can you commit something like "cleanup and performance boost for color-coded output" when there is not even a proof of concept that the language is implementable? He's worked a lot on the parsing and the front-end, but I wish he would get something compiled, anything, and just show that his idea can work, instead of debating about things that are ridiculously minor for the moment like syntax or an interactive environment. Chancho's post is exactly my thoughts.

For example, why not compile or manually translate some examples to C as a prototype? What can be done in assembly can mostly be done in C as well, if you're willing to sacrifice some performance.

Well, fwiw, the binary that does exist (which does, as far as i can tell, parsing, type inference/type checking and a bunch of semantics checking, plus it walks to AST to generate code (except it doesn't actually generate code yet), so far is insanely fast, even in verbose mode (where it prints a load of shit to stdout).

As for proof of concepts, on the mailing list he has stated that ANI is more or less a natural progression from previous unreleased projects.

Having said that, I agree that focusing on getting something working before trying to make it fast is the correct way to do it...