It is certainly true that some of the things on my wish list are things Lisp has long been famous for having. Unfortunately, I'm sorry to say, I would really like them in a language that isn't syntactically Lisplike!

I'm not so wedded to the C/C++ style of syntax as to tolerate no divergence from even the bad parts (e.g. C's declarator syntax would probably be the first thing to go if I ever did sit down at the drawing board for serious), but I do think that one or two basic amenities such as an infix expression grammar are not things I'm prepared to do without in the language I use all the time for everything. I tolerate Lispy syntax in my .emacs because I don't spend my whole life writing .emacs; I'd lose patience if I did.

Hm. Come to think of it, maybe "deciding on a subset of lisp and a consistent easy-to-use syntax for it" is what language design should be :)