I feel like languages are playing around different paints if coat mostly, and not trying to build more meaningful programming experiences.
I'd love to see a language whose pitch is that they have very next level stdlibs builtin. Effect for example is basically a mini stdlibs unto itself. It would be amazing to see such a principled deliberate craft applied to a language. Scope, layers etc etc etc etc: make visible, make first-class the actual pieces of computing, make them part of the language, explicitly modelled.
I'm also super excited for Zena, which just got announced yesterday! A typescript alike that compiles to wasm, and which really leans in to modern wasm, such as gc, wasi. A language that sits well at the cross-roads, that is excellent glue, that runs anywhere, that bridges other languages, is very compelling. https://justinfagnani.com/2026/09/09/zena-a-new-wasm-first-p...
Most of my research conversations with Claude nowadays are basically about this—what it would take to make every latent bit of program semantics visible and expressible in the language itself. As you put it, first-class everything.
At this point I think we have good solutions for expressing pretty much all the most common program semantics, but there’s no language that brings them all together under a unified syntax, tooling, etc.