I like writing languages, but I really don’t understand what possesses someone to write a new language that’s essentially a syntactic reskin of the same set of imperative/OO features found in most popular languages. We don’t need new syntax—we need new semantics.
It's a flyweight language which makes it suitable for embedded devices. It brings some modern language conveniences to the embedded world; (eg. it's the language electric imp uses for the IoT devices: http://electricimp.com/)
It's a relatively (10+ years) old language, and it is innovative in that it combines a scripting language with ref counting as opposed to garbage collection. How many other scripting languages do this?
Reference counting is a form of garbage collection, although a very bad one. And I don't know about the others, but Python does use reference counting, although it combines it with another garbage collection algorithm to avoid some of reference counting's most egregious failures (it not being able to collect cycles).
Reference counting isn't even very bad; for certain patterns of allocation, it's even optimal. However, for certain people, having to manually deal with cycles is enough to switch to a mark-and-sweep type collection mechanism.
