What do I want out of a language

• Lazy evaluation! Along with map, reduce, where kinds of operators.
• Familiar syntax. I'm used to C flavoured languages, so expect things like {} for blocks, a.b.c for member access.
• No destinction between calling a method and accessing a property (e.g., I shouldn't have to care if foo.Length needs a pair of brackets or not).
• Useful standard library
• Good module story
• Top level functions
• Types, probably. But if I'm having types, I want to be able to trivially declare (e.g) a size type that's got the same operators as int, except negative values throw and assigning a count to a size is a compile time error.
• Thrown exceptions

Blah! I'm having one of those "don't know what to do with myself" mornings. I don't have the motivation to program, or do anything really, so I'm back in bed whining to you.

Looking at rewriting MediaBrowser (a tool to rip recorded TV off our PVR) (because I don't have enough half finished projects).

I've found a easy to use UPNP library for .NET that can find the PVR on the local network and give me the url to poke for the "Content Service".

That speaks SOAP, but that's easy enough to fake. I've built a basic "What's in this folder" request, and have used curl to POST it and get results back. The results are all covered in namespaces (did I mention this is all XML? It's all XML), and the interesting bits are sent as HTML escaped XML. Sigh.

However, so long as I keep focused and write a "List and copy files from this one make of PVR" tool, and not some general, cope with everything DLNA library, I should be fine.

Maybe if I write a library, I can get husband to do the front end?