Hi Clement
I think your idea is very interesting under several perspectives, and
not crazy at all .
Do you have a particular language or project in mind or is it a general
question ?
Apart of what has been said by others (agree with everything - and I
didn't know Helvetia, it looks great),
it could be a great opening for Pharo, very appealing to lot of developers.
IMHO it could be extremely interesting to have Javascript or Groovy
language support integrated,
Those languages are often used as base scripting systems in various
tools plus they have lot of users.
(about tools, JS in browsers, nodejs and mongo, Groovy in Gradle, JMeter
and ElasticSearch,
firsts that came in my mind).
Plus Pivotal stopped Groovy development funding few month ago, however,
most of them use java interop,
may be a problem?
That may be one of the biggest problem : not the language and the
compiler but the libraries,
base classes it relies upon and it's semantic.
And as Jan said, targeting for a particular system means a compatibility
level ,
and "myriad of little details ..." that are very importants
About semantics -and just for fun - let's talk about ruby
and javascript
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
:)
Regards,
Alain