LÖVE

Quote from the main page:

Jx9 is an embeddable scripting engine that implements a Turing complete programming language based on JSON.
Jx9 is the ideal library to use in applications that require modern and efficient scripting support such as games, database systems, text editors, network applications and so forth. Jx9 borrows concepts from Lua, but uses a clean and familiar syntax similar to C, JavaScript and JSON with a rich standard library built with over 303 functions and 139 constants, making it more accessible to programmers. Jx9 also natively supports multi-threading and the concept of separate engine handles and virtual machines.

Link: Jx9

It seems interesting, and C syntax highlighting seems to work well with it

Despite their claim that Jx9 looks similar to "C, JavaScript and JSON," it looks much more like PHP to me. That is not inherently bad; that is just my opinion. As for whether or not it is a direct competitor to Lua, time will tell. Some quick searching did not turn up any projects actually using the language so I suspect it is not as old and mature as Lua. It would be interesting to see a game engine that uses it so that we could compare that to LÖVE, but such an engine does not seem to exist, even though they claim Jx9 is well-suited for that purpose.

Dollar signs prefix variable names? Pass.

A bit iffy that they use the OSI logo in the large on their home page. I know they are saying "this shit's open source, yo", but it seems like they're saying "the OSI thinks we're awesome and is, like, sponsoring us or whatever". They also use their own obscure license, which seems to be identical to another (apparently slightly less) obscure license, which raises the question: why didn't they just release it under that license?

Also, what new language has semicolons in this day and age?

As a bonus, it reminds me of PHP as well (not just because of the dollar prefix): it has this wimpy quality of "I can't decide whether I want to go high (Lua/JavaScript) or low (C/C++) level, so I use syntax from both and use the good parts from neither". (Observe PHP is the same thing, except it has Perl in the place of Lua/JavaScript.)

My biggest gripe with Jx9 is that it is so boring: it seems to bring nothing new to the table, and it has nothing that makes it worth learning and using --- or if there is, they have a really bad website: they should advertise that shit.

I agree with Robin's sentiments that Jx9 is just boring and brings nothing new to the table. Why should I bother using this instead of Lua or any of its numerous other competitors? The only reason I can see that I'd use this over Lua is if I wanted a curly bracket language with C or ECMAScript influenced syntax (I generally like both of these things actually, but this reason alone wouldn't make me switch). I think that its lack of popularity far outweighs this though, especially when there are better alternatives with similar syntax.

Also, its similarities to PHP scare me. PHP is the devil. Worst scripting language ever. Ok, maybe I'm being harsh on PHP...but I seriously hate working with it.

Robin wrote: Also, what new language has semicolons in this day and age?

Awesome ones.

Seriously, I actually like writing semi-colons at the end of lines...strange? Probably.