Try a descendant in q/kdb+ at kx.com. No special symbol set required. For reference, "Q for Mortals" is a good read, and Joel at wagerlabs.com blogs about q/kdb+ occasionally.
q/kdb+ could turn into something really useful, and has some nice tricks, like very easy to use remoting capabilities, and a way to send lambdas to another machine anywhere and have that machine run the code. Unfortunately q/kdb+ are still a bit too domain specific to the finance world where the product apparently has a strong commercial following, so some of the stuff, like a robust, secure web server to compliment the powerful remoting capabilities is currently not available. Additionally, the language should have separate variable creation and setter operators, because it would be pretty easy to inadvertently start working with a new var after a mistype when an original var was intended.
If this stuff was cleaned up for consumption by a larger market, I think it would be pretty hot.
Unquestionably so (although it is interesting to note that there was a post here a few weeks ago suggesting that the restriction of the ASCII character set was holding language development back.)
What I find more interesting is how little reference there seems to be to it, these days-- I'm not surprised that it is not in widespread usage, but I'd think that it would come up more often in language-related discussions.
q/kdb+ could turn into something really useful, and has some nice tricks, like very easy to use remoting capabilities, and a way to send lambdas to another machine anywhere and have that machine run the code. Unfortunately q/kdb+ are still a bit too domain specific to the finance world where the product apparently has a strong commercial following, so some of the stuff, like a robust, secure web server to compliment the powerful remoting capabilities is currently not available. Additionally, the language should have separate variable creation and setter operators, because it would be pretty easy to inadvertently start working with a new var after a mistype when an original var was intended.
If this stuff was cleaned up for consumption by a larger market, I think it would be pretty hot.