Recently I ran across something pretty interesting. It's a language called "Go" and my very impression was, "yeah right", another programming language that claims it is great. However, when I saw the name "Ken Thompson" and "Rob Pike" attached to it, I got excited.
There have been a few close calls, but so far nothing has enticed me away from C. The VAST majority of languages are interpreted and slow - at least for the needs of a world class chess program.
The close calls have been D by digital mars, Lisaac and Vala. What these languages have in common is that they are compiled to fast native code and they are system languages, in the sense that you can have good low level control over your hardware. And they are much more modern than C, which is a wonderful language, but was designed 2 million years ago and despite much modernization still feels like driving a model T.
Languages like Java and their derivatives are reasonably fast, but seem to give up too much control - I cannot imagine writing a super high performance chess program in java or scala.
This of course may prove to another disappointment, but it certainly deserves a look. With Ken Thompson involved I feel like there is someone there who gets it. And even if it doesn't replace C for chess it might replace the high level languages I use.
Here is a blurb from the web page:
Go was born out of frustration with existing languages and environments for systems programming. Programming had become too difficult and the choice of languages was partly to blame. One had to choose either efficient compilation, efficient execution, or ease of programming; all three were not available in the same mainstream language. Programmers who could were choosing ease over safety and efficiency by moving to dynamically typed languages such as Python and JavaScript rather than C++ or, to a lesser extent, Java.