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this isn't a programming language, but an architecture, but i mention it just because Alan Kay is totally enamoured of it:
"
The reason that line lived on—even though the establishment didn’t like it—was precisely because it was almost impossible to crash it, and so the banking industry kept on buying this line of machines, starting with the B5000. Barton was one of my professors in college, and I had adapted some of the ideas on the first desktop machine that I did. Then we did a much better job of adapting the ideas at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center).
Neither Intel nor Motorola nor any other chip company understands the first thing about why that architecture was a good idea.
Just as an aside, to give you an interesting benchmark—on roughly the same system, roughly optimized the same way, a benchmark from 1979 at Xerox PARC runs only 50 times faster today. Moore’s law has given us somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 times improvement in that time. So there’s approximately a factor of 1,000 in efficiency that has been lost by bad CPU architectures. " -- http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523
