I don't think the ability to write expressions similar to natural language like "2.days.from_now" should be called "expresiveness". Real expresiveness is about what SICP calls "means of abstraction" and "means of combination", not necessarily about having very nice syntax. In general I think those considerations would benefit from distinguishing a bit more between syntax and semantics. As another example, I have been doing Ruby professionally for almost 10 years now, and despite this I have to strongly disagree with the conclusion of this quotation:

Python is a beautiful, clean language. But the same restrictions that make it nice and clean mean that it’s hard to write beautiful, clean libraries. Ruby, on the other hand, is a complicated, ugly language. But that complexity allows you to write really clean, nice, easy-to-use libraries.

The Ruby metaprogramming magic makes for really nice syntax, which is what made me choose it over Python all those years ago, but it complicates understanding of what's going on - as I matured as an engineer, maintained a codebase over several years, several times spend long hours debugging issues coming from metaprogramming pitfalls, I shift more and more to the Python approach of building APIs in the simplest possible way, as much as possible sticking to simple function calls and no really fancy metaprogramming just to get a cleaner syntax, e.g. compare Rails has_many :foo with Django's models.ForeignKey(Foo) and the internal implementations of those. Same thing with using "BDD" testing frameworks like RSpec vs. traditional assert stuff, what is the nice syntax worth if tricky bugs hit you where you most want to avoid it, in tests. Libraries like RSpec might be "nice", but they are certainly not "easy-to-use", and I don't think I would call them quite "clean", if I look at their source code.

In other words, while clean syntax is luring, in the long run clean and simple semantics is what I think is really important.

This is going to be horribly negative so a bit of context first: I'm a professional C# programmer. I love C#, I think it's a great language.

But there's a huge downside: C# only works on Windows. This vastly reduces the number of things you can do with it (yeah, I know about Mono). There's nothing here that suggests that this would have anything other than the same restrictions. So, assuming the language develops into everything that's promised, you're left with something on which you can't do mobile, can't do big data, probably won't work very well for scientific computing. In fact, basically you're still stuck with the same LoB apps and ETL tools that C#'s already great at. And probably the same second rate (not awful, not great) web experience.

So the best you can hope for, basically, is a better C#. But not good enough to take on Java.

Don't get me wrong, it sounds exciting, but equally I worry that it'll be used as a way to generate patents to prevent the ideas being used elsewhere in environments where, tbh, they'd find more use.

I'm most bullish on bitcoin when I read articles such as this one, and most skeptical when I read the thoughts of the bitcoin believers. It's truly the most interesting technological development in years, if only because it reveals how little anyone really understands money or economics.

Here's another interesting (though imperfect) way of thinking about bitcoin: it's a decentralized corporation, where bitcoins are ownership shares and the business is money transfer, like a decentralized Western Union. And for further thought, could other types of businesses also be structured in this way?