Factor language

I stumbled onto Factor language (I don't remember how, now), and I find it very appealing. It tries to balance the ease of use of scripting (interpreter) language with performance of statically compiled languages. It is basically a fancy, modernized version of Forth. The goal of making everything (GUI, editor, etc) writen in Factor is a nice ideal. (Much like Smalltalk.)

Unfortunately, I don't think that people who want to write code care so much about language purity. Which is why I believe Smalltalk didn't take off so well -- too much on the purity side and not enough usability (Java was slow but freely available, while Smalltalk wasn't free for a long time).

I don't know what the right focus will be for a language but I believe that a tool which is easy to use but powerful and accomodating (can interact with JVM or SVM or C). Being able to generate for, say, JVM would make the final product more portable.

I'm not sure how to deal with "when something goes wrong" outside of the tool/language (e.g., while it is running on browser as Ajax code).