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It's my favorite APL dialect. See kx.com. Designed by the same guy who did A+. The basic function without any formatting would just be tohex:{"0123456789ABCDEF" 16 _vs x}. I'll give a hint: you can index a vector by another vector. 1 2 3[0 1 2 0] ==> 1 2 3 1. Another: _vs stands for "vector from scalar." I was kidding when I said it's more newbie friendly than mushcode... kind of.
I don't think continuations (and other counter-intuitive constructs like monads, arrows etc) are particularly newbie friendly. Actually I recall having trouble understanding continuations at first myself (and don't show them ), but I don't think lambda is overly scary on its own. Really it depends on how it's being used. Map and filter are easy to explain. Fold a bit less so. Y is right out.
I don't think adding a bunch of syntax for special cases (like Guido seems to want to do with Python) is a better answer, for sure. Though it might be more 'newbie friendly'. I'm not even sure how such a thing can be judged. Is it harder to learn how to use the general construct than to learn something like list comprehension syntax or generator expressions?
Don't like it much at all. It seems rather superfluous in the Java-script-language context (as there are already plenty of those existing and working -- even 'Java'-ish ones, like BeanShell), its grammar is screwy... and now they're making this problem even more confusing and weird by splitting into "JSR" syntax and "Classic" syntax. What are the advantages of Groovy over something like Jython, Beanshell, ABCL?
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