Volition

Nice looks like a, err, nice programming language. It complies to Java bytecode and so can be run on any modern JVM (hence also is compatible with the huge number of Java class libraries out there) and offers a lot of improvements over Java-the-language.

The Nice compiler automatically provides getter and setter methods for public fields. This addresses one part of my main gripe about Java-the-language; that it doesn't have built in support for providing code blocks to be invoked when accessing fields using the object.field syntax. At least in Nice your source isn't littered with single-line getter/setter methods.

It seems to support everything else you would want from a modern language like parametric classes, assertions, contracts, anonymous functions and a bunch of other nifty features.

It would also be nice if there was a runtime-intrepreted version of it. I still need a GPL-compatible scripting engine for SWars. I've been considering Jython for a while but last I checked it wasn't GPL-compatible and I prefer Ruby. Happily, JRuby seems to be making some progress and is GPLed.

Via a /. article about an introduction to JRuby.