Tezos, which is itself written in OCaml (what originally attracted me to the platform), already has a relatively well design language for writing contracts called Michelson (https://tezos.gitlab.io/master/whitedoc/michelson.html). I say "relatively", compared to the dumpster fire that is Solidity...
Personally, I've always wanted take a look at Liquidity Lang [0] which exists on top of Michelson. At a glance, it seems to solve a large number of issues that have caused bugs in Solidity smart contracts (e.g. liquidity has abstract data types, disallows inline mutation of state, etc)
Why all these new languages? No one really wants to learn yet another language.
The big 4 public dapp blockchains use C++, Solidity and JavaScript. I can't imagine C++ and Solidity is okay. IOST went with JavaScript and the V8 engine for it's smart contracts. That seems the most reasonable as they can leverage a massive amount of JavaScript code.
Will be interesting once people realize they have a way to monetize webapps with a browser extension/wallet. Just think about all the web based JavaScript games that died because no way to monetize. Someone should be porting those over.
Plus, it took IOST only 8 weeks to passed up ETH in total number of blockchain transactions. ETH was launched back in June 2015. IOST has a fast ass blockchain.
