Something like Dhall is much better for long-term maintainability. But people don't want a language that makes them write consistent, maintainable code. They'd rather have a language where you can leave the quotes off your strings and it will work most of the time except when it doesn't.
that's what i'm talking about. people don't want to know about first class functions, closures, immutability, monads, object orientation, polymorphism, inheritance, generics, contravariance, covariance, threading, concurrency, race conditions, memory safety or package managers. they just want to whip up some shit and have it work.
and you're right they don't care about long-term maintainability at all. that leads to all the conceptual overhead though. they'd rather have a horribly bolted together language than be forced to worry about the concepts that lead to long-term maintainability.
I'm thinking more like an actual shell scripting language where you have control flow, some modularity, good support for dealing with unstructured data and the ability (for software developers) to plug DSLs into the back end of the language and expose them to end users to use, and that's about it. First class functions, closures, immutability, object orientation, etc would not be in the language to keep it conceptually simple. This would render the language pretty useless for building applications out of it, but the point would be to gear it more towards people who didn't know those kinds of compsci concepts at all.
The goal would be the least amount of conceptual overhead possible and therefore the most amount of accessibility.
> Starlark is intended not for writing applications but for expressing configuration: its programs are short-lived and have no external side effects
I also don't think it has threading primitives
Most programming languages are written to impress other programmers. We need a programming language which is trivial to learn, which you couldn't ever use to write a webserver, but you would use it to configure one.