The buck stops somewhere, the history is not that long - if you trace all the ancestors and key influencers of a single language, that's generally 10 at most; and if you trace another language, half of them will overlap.
You can't really skip that step anyway, it's not like you can make an informed decision about a particular syntax feature if you haven't taken a serious look on how that feature works or doesn't work in a dozen languages; and the more obscure languages tend to be very useful in this regard because they explore a larger variety of features and their combinations. Getting a short overview of syntax of at least some 25 languages would be a reasonable prerequisite before designing another one, and that overview would still be the easy and straightforward part.
There's a family tree of languages here: http://www.digibarn.com/collections/posters/tongues/tongues....
This actually sounds quite interesting. You're starting from a good language (Smalltalk) and adding a feature absent from it but widely regarded as desirable (strong static typing).
> and clean up its syntax a bit (it's already pretty clean, just a few things could be improved)
If you go for type inference instead of having types explicitly declared, you might be able to avoid both run-time type checks and changes to Smalltalk's syntax.
> essentially a faster Smalltalk.
Bryce Kampjes (http://www.kampjes.demon.co.uk/index.html) was working on compiling Smalltalk byte code into machine code to speed it up, but that didn't involve changes to the language, so I think run-time type checks would still have been necessary. Making static type checks would result in a further speed-up.
Good luck.
Thanks!
Report can be found at https://gist.github.com/ndrewxie/54d3299c998569c27e281d2320b...