What are new languages useful for - finding use cases for Offsider

One of my colleagues today demonstrated what I could call an interesting piece of Computer Science. He has created a "system" for lack of a better word called Offsider. After the presentation I was left with a niggling thought that this must have som开发者_运维知识库e sort of precedence.

It feels like an object based shell like python with instant pickling of the objects on creation in what feels like a php file based sessions. Can anyone draw any well established parallels to this ? What would be reasonable use cases for it ?

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A couple of parallels:

• "Everything is message passing" was done first (and still best) by Smalltalk.

• Many years ago Dave Hanson and Chris Fraser tried an experiment that basically said "the language is the operating system." (It didn't go anywhere.) Your colleague's proposal smells like "let's talk to the existing operating system as if it were an object-oriented language".

In my mind, the main ideas that distinguish Unix are

• Everything is a file
• Many files are text
• Files can be piped through programs using standard input and standard output

I don't see how this model is improved by layering objects on top of it. Objects don't fit the existing Unix model, so you're going to wind up creating an entirely new set of programs that use the object model. At this point you may as well just use one of the many fine object-oriented programming languages in the world, or if you want more than one, one of the many awful interoperability tools like CORBA.

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i think it's another one of those esoteric programming languages so many are written but so little is written in most of them

they normally have some interesting feature but no one is quite sure how to build on that